This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine if, in 100 years, there was a massive Carrington Event and most of the world's data was destroyed. How would we piece our history back together?
How would we piece our history back together?
Maybe some kind of foundation to stem the period of bahbawism?
Remember what happened to that foundation? And the alternative doesn't actually work based on our medical and scientific knowledge.
Stupid psychohistory.
Stupid sexy Harry.
"The aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning."
Lol, this must've been hella confusing.
Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<
Bro Texas won't even pay to weatherize their power grid and they know cold weather happens every winter.
Can't say you're wrong tbh :p
Pretty obvious. We build a time machine to go back to 1776. Then, when it malfunctions and sends to 1976 instead we learn the art of The Hustle.
I'll be honest, I had forgotten MySpace was a thing back then. Every single page I went to was gaudy as hell and took forever to load on my dial up connection at the time. I'm a little surprised they're still around. And damn, it looks a lot different!
Yea it’s a music centric site now, right?
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. They either have 6-10 employees and 1-5M in revenue, or 523 employees and 84.2M in revenue, depending on whether you misspell ‘employees’ in the search or not (on bing).
I don't remember the specific article I read that dove into this but it was essentially sold due to it being one of the first large data collections (user data). I'm not sure the extent its traweled now but before the social media machine took off, it was the largest if not one of the largest concentrations of actual data points to run algorithms against.
Someday historians will be reading all those emails our grandparents printed looking for cultural context.
Super interesting read, thanks for posting. (Pls don't delete my comment)
I see this as a plus. People have a right to be forgotten. The problem nowadays is that companies track you and keep all your data forever and then use it to advertise to you.
At the very least, data collection and preservation should be explicitly opt-in.
If you really want to save something, download it yourself.
