Media takes up space. The text from posts and comments is trivial. The database for lemmy.world is only 25 GB. Wikipedia text is only 21 GB.
hawkwind
joined 2 years ago
That is exactly what that means and it's frustrating to say the least, because it's not clear that's what's happening.
It works a lot like like email between instances. Let’s call your self hosted instance “A” and the popular remote instance “B.”
User on A searches for “poodles” and finds a community !poodles@B. When they click the search results: A sends B mail saying “send me the last 10 posts for poodles.” B sends A mail with the posts and the user sees the posts, but none have comments.
If nothing else happens then those 10 posts will just hang out doing nothing on A, but if the user clicks subscribe then A sends another mail to B saying “my user wants to follow poodles.” B replies saying “cool, I’ll send you everything from poodles now.” Now, anything a post or comment happens B checks lots list of subscribing instances and sends copies of them.
If user on A comments on !poodles@B or posts, it creates it on A but sends a mail to B saying “here is some new stuff for poodles!”
When you create that instance, do you immediately need to download and store all the data that has ever been posted to all federated Lemmy instances?
Run my own instance. @Candelestine@lemmy.world is right but there are more details. Federation is not a "sync." When your instance needs to fetch from another instance it will, but it does not get history. You can get a specific comment or post from any time however.
Or perhaps you only need to download and store everything that is posted to the federated Lemmy instances from that point forward?
This is not by default either. Only communities that your users subscribe to will be updated by their "origin" instances.
Or better yet, do you only store what the users on that instance do (i.e. their posts, and posts to the communities hosted on that instance)?
This does happen, but it also stores what your users do on remote instances as well as "copies" of what they interact with. Images (currently the only media hosted by lemmy servers) are linked to thier "origin" as well. So you are storing text of posts and comments.
We should charge for API use now. :)
I think the exception is companies “too big to die.” They serve as the archangels of tech so ALL other goals lead to being bought by FAANG or dying.
I am not ambitious enough unfortunately, and probably not smart enough either.
It's a game of leapfrog and it's at a little bit of a stalemate because people just pay $5/mo. for a VPN. It was a monetization race and that's were we landed. I'm sure copyright holders are not happy with that, but there's no incentive to develop or change anything because who doesn't have $5/mo?
It used to be that just being on the internet made you trusted enough to get the warez. I don't know how to keep the movement alive with big brother watching out for his homies so hard. Decentralize, encrypt and anonymize I suppose. BT needs an overhaul to prevent attribution. Ten bucks says it's easily possibile but the VPN companies who have our back will lobby against it, lol.
The thing with piracy these days is there is a huge fear of legal burden AND extreme protectiveness to prevent takedowns. It's the same thing as being a gang member and suspicious of new blood being undercover cops. Once you find actual piracy that works, the last thing you want to do is post publicly about it!
Uh. That’s only part of the story. Bots can get through basically all verification. The defederation is more political than it is about spam bots.
Yea, maybe that page is a little misleading. lemmy-ui is probably what you're using now. It's the "webserver" that comes with lemmy that lets you access it from a browser (phone or desktop.) It's not the ONLY option, but most instances (sites like lemmy.ml) use it. You can expect to see a bunch of phone and even other apps on that page as lemmy gets bigger.
I think you're right. People will gravitate to the most stable large instances because their "All" will be as close to 100% as possible without doing anything special. I wrote a script to seed instances and update subscriptions, but it uses a single account that is subscribed to everything so that other users can see everything. That's not something that would normally happen. Maybe that needs to be part of the base software?