In order to avoid this restriction you would need a global instance discovery mechanism, which is extremely hard to implement without a central server that keeps a list of all instances in the network. And if you do implement instance discovery through a central server you really are losing the whole point of decentralization.
Additionally, it’s good that each instance does not federate with everyone else by default. If it did, it would have to process all activity and keep a local copy of all the content in the entire network. This would be insanely inefficient, and make it prohibitively expensive to run even a tiny instance with 1 user and no communities.
Decentralization isn’t useless if you can’t immediately see everything in the network, come on… We’re just spoiled by centralized services.
you would need a global instance discovery mechanism
I don’t think you do. Instances should merely reach out to other instances it’s federated with periodically to get a list of communities and some of their metadata. Ideally, they could ask all of those other instances to notify it when a community is added, modified, or deleted, and then store that metadata.
That should be pretty easy to implement, and maybe it already has, idk.
Sure, but this isn’t finding new instances, just new communities on known instances. Indeed, this is not difficult to implement. The reason it’s not done already is for resource economy. A lot of instances are already struggling to scale, making them process and store a lot more content with little value for most users of the instance isn’t feasible for a lot of servers right now.
A list of communities isn’t “a lot more content.” Just run it once daily and the problem is solved. Instances don’t need to store posts, just community names available on that instance.
If the issue is finding new instances, I think it’s fine for it to take some time the first time someone tries to find a community on that instance. But after that, it should immediately have a list of communities from that instance.
Ummmm… All you need is some bots on each instance that automatically will interact once with communities known on lemmyverse.net and boom, you have unlocked full federation for every user on those instances. You are not losing any privacy through that, it just skips the steps where user has to manually index a sublemmy before it federates and makes platform more usable.
Sure, but now this system has a dependency on the “centralized” lemmyverse.net service. And also your instance now has to receive and store a copy of almost the entire network’s content. Lots of instances are already struggling to sustain the load, this would make the problem even worse.
If a single instance decides that it can sustain the increased load and doesn’t mind depending on lemmyverse.net sure, nothing’s stopping them. But it shouldn’t be the default behavior for all instances.
If load is that big of a problem then pretty much all instances are in a big trouble because all you need is ONE person that decides to run some bots and it’s done anyway.
Well yeah, this is a fair point. It’s on the instance admins to vet signups and monitor usage. In general the fediverse has a lot of potential for easy DOS attacks, it’s one of the main weak points.
Yet bittorrent dht is 20 years old. How can this supposedly decentralized service be unable to self organize. Is Lemmy some kitchen napkin high school fair project ?
Social media and torrents are pretty damn different. There’s a reason no federated platform has implemented automatic discovery, even ones with much more resources than Lemmy, like Mastodon.
I don’t know why you folks keep pointing at missing features and saying “Lemmy doesn’t have this pretty advanced network feature, so it’s not really decentralized”, or “it cannot organize”, or “it’s useless”… It’s basically two people’s passion project that only blew up in the past month because reddit fucked up. You’re not paying for it, are you? So I really don’t see how this attitude is warranted.
The tech is right there, it’s 20 years old. I’m pointing at it in response to people saying “this is too hard, we can’t have 700 instances sharing a few kilobytes of text !, You’re asking too much”
Look, if you understand what a DHT is I also expect you to understand the amount of effort it would take to implement such a feature. The fact that the tech exists does not mean you can just plug it in and go. It took the devs weeks to move from websockets to HTTP, a feature like this would take months and take time away from a lot of other important work.
The pseudocode for this feature is as follows
Cron job to be run at regular intervals (say top of the hour)
Query database for all content (posts, comments) between last packet and now, place in packet.
Query database for all moderation actions ( votes, censure, blocking, pinning, etc ) between last packet and now, place in packet.
Take packet, name with name on instance plus date range.
Export as dht enable magnet link torrent
Forward magnet url to all known federated instances
That’s certainly an option. Probably pretty useful too. Though I think it would put quite a load on server resources to have every community in the threadiverse cached though.
I don’t know enough about how the instances interact on the activitypub protocol to comment on that. I see that Mastodon has over 11,000 instances running, and haven’t heard of instabilities, but they also are fundamentally different applications so idk how comparable they are.
How is that not part of base code. Lemmy is completely unusable until this is fixed. The clock is ticking on Reddit’s implosion. If this isn’t fixed, the Reddit userbase will go back to Reddit for another 20 years.
Please don’t let Lemmy as useless as Mastodon, this is clearly design sabotage by silicon Valley big tech.
Calm down bro. Your negative energy is harshing the vibe here. Let’s try that again
I see, thanks for the info. The devs should prioritize adding a feature like that into the base code. It would really help reddit migrants get set up here.
See? I liked a couple of your comments in the other thread about downvotes being public information, but you’re sounding pretty defeatist and frankly, miserable in the past few hours. If you don’t want the reddit userbase to go back, the best thing you can do is be a user that other users enjoy interacting with.
Unless you wanna step in and start coding this thing 🤣
In order to avoid this restriction you would need a global instance discovery mechanism, which is extremely hard to implement without a central server that keeps a list of all instances in the network. And if you do implement instance discovery through a central server you really are losing the whole point of decentralization.
Additionally, it’s good that each instance does not federate with everyone else by default. If it did, it would have to process all activity and keep a local copy of all the content in the entire network. This would be insanely inefficient, and make it prohibitively expensive to run even a tiny instance with 1 user and no communities.
Decentralization isn’t useless if you can’t immediately see everything in the network, come on… We’re just spoiled by centralized services.
I don’t think you do. Instances should merely reach out to other instances it’s federated with periodically to get a list of communities and some of their metadata. Ideally, they could ask all of those other instances to notify it when a community is added, modified, or deleted, and then store that metadata.
That should be pretty easy to implement, and maybe it already has, idk.
Sure, but this isn’t finding new instances, just new communities on known instances. Indeed, this is not difficult to implement. The reason it’s not done already is for resource economy. A lot of instances are already struggling to scale, making them process and store a lot more content with little value for most users of the instance isn’t feasible for a lot of servers right now.
A list of communities isn’t “a lot more content.” Just run it once daily and the problem is solved. Instances don’t need to store posts, just community names available on that instance.
If the issue is finding new instances, I think it’s fine for it to take some time the first time someone tries to find a community on that instance. But after that, it should immediately have a list of communities from that instance.
Ummmm… All you need is some bots on each instance that automatically will interact once with communities known on lemmyverse.net and boom, you have unlocked full federation for every user on those instances. You are not losing any privacy through that, it just skips the steps where user has to manually index a sublemmy before it federates and makes platform more usable.
Sure, but now this system has a dependency on the “centralized” lemmyverse.net service. And also your instance now has to receive and store a copy of almost the entire network’s content. Lots of instances are already struggling to sustain the load, this would make the problem even worse.
If a single instance decides that it can sustain the increased load and doesn’t mind depending on lemmyverse.net sure, nothing’s stopping them. But it shouldn’t be the default behavior for all instances.
If load is that big of a problem then pretty much all instances are in a big trouble because all you need is ONE person that decides to run some bots and it’s done anyway.
Well yeah, this is a fair point. It’s on the instance admins to vet signups and monitor usage. In general the fediverse has a lot of potential for easy DOS attacks, it’s one of the main weak points.
I will send you my post on how we got 550 000 bot accounts in 3 days lol
https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/176547
Oh right, forgot to mention it, lemmyverse.net is open source so there’s no problem with centralisation because you can run it yourself 👍
Yet bittorrent dht is 20 years old. How can this supposedly decentralized service be unable to self organize. Is Lemmy some kitchen napkin high school fair project ?
Social media and torrents are pretty damn different. There’s a reason no federated platform has implemented automatic discovery, even ones with much more resources than Lemmy, like Mastodon.
I don’t know why you folks keep pointing at missing features and saying “Lemmy doesn’t have this pretty advanced network feature, so it’s not really decentralized”, or “it cannot organize”, or “it’s useless”… It’s basically two people’s passion project that only blew up in the past month because reddit fucked up. You’re not paying for it, are you? So I really don’t see how this attitude is warranted.
The tech is right there, it’s 20 years old. I’m pointing at it in response to people saying “this is too hard, we can’t have 700 instances sharing a few kilobytes of text !, You’re asking too much”
Look, if you understand what a DHT is I also expect you to understand the amount of effort it would take to implement such a feature. The fact that the tech exists does not mean you can just plug it in and go. It took the devs weeks to move from websockets to HTTP, a feature like this would take months and take time away from a lot of other important work.
The pseudocode for this feature is as follows Cron job to be run at regular intervals (say top of the hour) Query database for all content (posts, comments) between last packet and now, place in packet. Query database for all moderation actions ( votes, censure, blocking, pinning, etc ) between last packet and now, place in packet. Take packet, name with name on instance plus date range. Export as dht enable magnet link torrent Forward magnet url to all known federated instances
That’s certainly an option. Probably pretty useful too. Though I think it would put quite a load on server resources to have every community in the threadiverse cached though.
Yeah, from what I see the whole thing is not scalable and will need some changes in how this all works… :/
I don’t know enough about how the instances interact on the activitypub protocol to comment on that. I see that Mastodon has over 11,000 instances running, and haven’t heard of instabilities, but they also are fundamentally different applications so idk how comparable they are.
How is that not part of base code. Lemmy is completely unusable until this is fixed. The clock is ticking on Reddit’s implosion. If this isn’t fixed, the Reddit userbase will go back to Reddit for another 20 years. Please don’t let Lemmy as useless as Mastodon, this is clearly design sabotage by silicon Valley big tech.
Calm down bro. Your negative energy is harshing the vibe here. Let’s try that again
See? I liked a couple of your comments in the other thread about downvotes being public information, but you’re sounding pretty defeatist and frankly, miserable in the past few hours. If you don’t want the reddit userbase to go back, the best thing you can do is be a user that other users enjoy interacting with.
Unless you wanna step in and start coding this thing 🤣
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