So what happens to your account if the server you joined goes down? Yes, you could always create a new account somewhere else, but you lose all your followed communities and post and comment histories as well.

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[–] Mastersord@lemmy.fmhy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But in those cases, the users trust that the server hosting the platform they are on isn’t just some guy’s Personal laptop.

Are there any stability requirements for starting up a server or can someone start up a server on their personal laptop?

The other problem is that eventually you will have only a few large servers because people who join will want as much content as possible. Basically the “Google” problem.

[–] Admetus@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The content from ALL is the same regardless of being from the same server or not. Yes, larger servers will have larger internal traffic so perhaps browsing will be faster. Small servers can still exist with few problems, especially if people prefer to only receive their subscribed posts.

[–] Mastersord@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ALL from Lemmy.world and ALL from other servers are not all the same. Each server has its own list of other servers which they federate with and some don’t necessarily federate with all the others. At least this is how I understand it and it confirms my observations and others have confirmed this as well.

[–] Admetus@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

This is true, which is why a solution will pop up maybe in the form of a website that could track what servers federate with what. People could choose a completely open server or a server that defederates the volatile ones.

[–] AyyLMAO@exploding-heads.com 1 points 1 year ago

can someone start up a server on their personal laptop?

Anyone can start a lemmy instance on their Raspberry micro computer, personal laptop, dedicated home server, script-compatible NAS'es and on and on.

But most Lemmy instances are hosted on VPS's for stability and scaleability.

The other problem is that eventually you will have only a few large servers because people who join will want as much content as possible.

This is an issue I've talked about before with the general response of "It'll sort itself out". Now, a few years later it's total fragmentation and a budding centralization with the new "megainstances".

I envision special interest servers that are monolithic in community nature, dominating certain topics. Unless there's some sort of mitigation, like a federated subscription list+multi"reddits" or something similar.