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What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age'
(spectrumlocalnews.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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So, in short, the whole “just someone else’s computer” thing will always come back to bite you. And of course, we’re still struggling with this. Here on the Fedi, everything is tied up on servers run by admins we know little about without much recourse to download archives or migrate, unless you’re up for full self hosting.
Except the fediverse is highly resilient in this regard, since all of the data is replicated. If an instance goes down, all of that instance’s posts are still available on every other instance.
There is that, yes. But how much control do you the user have over those caches should the original server/instance from which they were made go down? Can you easily archive or retrieve them? Edit or delete them? Do anything to further ensure their longevity? Link them back to your new social media account so that others can easily identify them as yours? Verify, in any way, that they were (or were not!) written by you as the owner of a new account?
These are all good points.
Definitely a few of the major things lacking in the Lemmy/kbin world.
theoretically one couls create a lemmyverse archive that crawls the lemmyverse and subscribes to all communities it finds and archives all federation activities that it receives
Would you even need to subscribe?
Setting up an instance should probably work, unless other instances choose to defederate from it, I guess
Instances only collect stuff from communities that have at least one subscriber on their sever.
And it looks like it may only pull new posts and comments and not old archives.
yeah pre-federation stuff would need another more complicated solution
I think it federates it if a user comments.. I think. Not sure.
according to the docs if you search a comment it will federate that comment, its direct ancestors, and the post it was made on. But not all the comments for that post
Ah interesting, didn't know that :)
Decentralized architecture is a pretty good middle-ground between centralized and distributed, though (see). Moving to a fully distributed social media -- which would look something like everyone running their own servers -- would carry costs and problems of its own, one of which is very few people have the time and inclination to learn how to do that and massive duplication of effort (everyone becomes responsible for creating and storing their own archives for posterity's sake, which means lots and lots of data will just go to the bit bucket to die)
The data being shared across federated servers allows people to set up 3rd-party archives, which is beneficial, without needlessly burdening instance operators with archival work (sort of a problem for sites like MySpace, there's nothing in it for them except maybe good PR, except digital archiving for posterity is such a niche interest there would likely be little PR benefit to doing so)
I increasingly suspect there are false dichotomies here. A user need not take full responsibility for their personal server/instance on the federation for them to truly own their data and presence. They only need to own a discrete component in the network that is easily moved and that contains their own personal information and identity. This component could just as easily be hosted on a large cloud service as it could on a bedroom Raspberry Pi, and, if truly nomadic, moved from being on one and then the other as is necessary.
It seems to me that most architectural thinking on this point fails to consider anything other than the "hardware" or server, in more or less traditional network terms, when, it seems to me, the issues concern the presentation and address-ability and mobility of the user as a discrete object.