I don’t think this will ever happen. The web is more than a network of changing documents. It’s a network of portals into systems which change state based on who is looking at them and what they do.

In order for something like this to work, you’d need to determine what the “official” view of any given document is, but the reality is that most documents are generated on the spot from many sources of data. And they aren’t just generated on the spot, they’re Turing complete documents which change themselves over time.

It’s a bit of a quantum problem - you can’t perfectly store a document while also allowing it to change, and the change in many cases is what gives it value.

Snapshots, distributed storage, and change feeds only work for static documents. Archive.org does this, and while you could probably improve the fidelity or efficiency, you won’t be able to change the underlying nature of what it is storing.

If all of reddit were deleted, it would definitely be useful to have a publically archived snapshot of Reddit. Doing so is definitely possible, particularly if they decide to cooperate with archival efforts. On the other hand, you can’t preserve all of the value by simply making a snapshot of the static content available.

All that said, if we limit ourselves to static documents, you still need to convince everyone to take part. That takes time and money away from productive pursuits such as actually creating content, to solve something which honestly doesn’t matter to the creator. It’s a solution to a problem which solely affects people accessing information after those who created it are no longer in a position to care about said information, with deep tradeoffs in efficiency, accessibility, and cost at the time of creation. You’d never get enough people to agree to it that it would make a difference.

Translation: you working harder would make me feel less stressed.

It wouldnt really be full P2P: I’d expect moderated communities to act as a funnel which everyone interacts with each other through. I wasn’t really considering the hypothetical micro instances to be like a normal server, since even when federated its unlikely that they would consume as much federation bandwidth as a large instance. Most people wouldn’t run a community, simply because they don’t want to moderate it.

Realistically, the abuse problems you mention can already currently happen if someone wants to. It’s easier to make an account on an existing server with a fresh email, spam a bit, and get banned than it is to register a new domain ($) and federate before doing the same. I think social networks would have a lot less spam if every time you wanted to send an abusive message, you had to spend $10 to burn a domain name.

Most of the content would still live on larger servers, so you end up moderating in the same place. Not much difference between banning an abusive user on your instance and banning an abusive single-user instance.

So let’s say we want to scale up to several million users - what would that look like?

So you’re saying that there’s a sweet spot between the number of servers being federated and the number of users per server. I wonder what the optimal network distribution would look like.

Those are definitely things to consider - I’m mostly thinking about technical constraints in scaling fediverse services out to meet large increases in demand.

I think the main difference between fediverse and email WRT cache instances is that if you create a cache instance for email, you’re only caching your personal emails. If you create a cache instance for a lemmy community, you’re caching every event on the community.

My intuition says there’s probably a breakpoint in community size where the cost of federating all events to the users who subscribe to them becomes greater than the cost of individually serving API requests to them on demand. Primarily because you’ll be caching a far greater amount of content than you actually consume, unlike with email.

Edit: That said, scaling out async work queues is a heck of a lot easier than scaling out web servers and databases. That fact alone might skew the breakpoint far enough that only communities with millions of subscribers see a flip in the cost equation…

Maybe I should clarify with “each user successfully spun up…” I’m mostly curious if the 5000 microservers trying to federate is a more sustainable access pattern than 5000 users hitting the website.

Since federation is an async process, it can be optimized on both ends in a way that user browser requests cannot.

At the same time, federation would overall result in more bandwidth being used because not every user wants to view every post in the frontend.

Wow so all interactions are hidden behind a press of an invisible long-hold button? What’s wrong with a swipe or single tap if there isn’t another interaction for it to conflict with?

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-orders-invidious-privacy-software-to-shut-down-in-7-days-230609/

YouTube is trying to get them shut down 💩

Not in the way BOTW is, it’s closer to Myst in that there’s a world (solar system) to explore with lots clues and lore but not a lot of irrelevant fluff.

Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”

I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.

That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.