TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we're working on making a fun replacement!
A number of days ago, feddit.uk had kicked the bucket.
The community on there had noticed months ago that the owner was inactive. This was around September (Going off of memory). So they arranged to set up a new community run by the same feddit.uk admins (except the owner, the only one who had host access) which would replace it. However, on the weekend as Quackhouse was going to be launched, the owner responded to an email and made two users admins. Emperor and GreatAlbatross. However, they did not have access to the console, just lemmy adminship. Ever since, the owner has been AWOL. The community were too afraid to go back to setting up Quackhouse incase the owner showed up again.
Unfortunately, that wariness and being afraid led to the worst case scenario happening - Feddit.uk has dropped offline. We believe the instance has reached some form of file size cap. It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then. And it appears that aeroplane has crashed.
If you are from the feddit.uk refugee base, please join the new community whenever it is ready. Do not sign up now. We are busy and still setting up and don't want an influx of new users just yet.
For now, sit tight. I'll update this post whenever it's up and running and ready for sign-ups. I am not posting the name for now so we don't get overrun with sign ups. But we would love to invite you back to our community when it's set up.
The new community will have it's own unique identity that doesn't have to piggyback off of Lemmy and Reddit for it's name. But it will still aim to be the main UK lemmy instance that feddit.uk was. By all means, it will be a full lemmy instance, still federated, etc. It should be the same experience as feddit.uk. But we actually do have fun plans to create a nice sense of identity with that instance if all goes well! I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
We look forward to having new members. All are welcome, whether or not you were from Feddit.UK or not. We will have the theme be a UK-based lemmy instance.
I'll try and remember to update this post when we are ready.
~20CX12
As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you're just there for data redundancy, users don't "sign up to your server", they "sign up to the website" that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.
I believe the idea behind different servers not meshing but federating, so they can have different focuses and different moderation stances.
But then you're still stuck with some kind of central authority, just let people decide what they want to block from their feed instead of relying on an admin to do part of the job for them.
Right now my admin could decide to defederate from a bunch of instances and there's nothing I could do about it except create a new account elsewhere. Same if they accidently die, all my data will be lost when the server is shut down.
Have a single website with decentralized servers and triple redundancy based on server location? You're pretty much bullet proof and it becomes much more interesting for small players that don't want to get too involved... Just give whatever space you've got available to the cause and let the software do its thing.
Not stuck. You can set up your own instance and be beholden to no-one other than your country's law
And you still lost all your previous data and you're still dependent on one point of failure, it's just in your own hands now.
It's also a question of wanting to make the website popular, if you don't care about getting more people to leave centralized websites then sure the current solution works, if you want more and more users to join then the experience needs to be user friendly and right now it isn't, even as a tech savvy person I had a hard time figuring out how to add communities from other instances to my subscribed list and I couldn't figure out why some would never confirm I was subscribed.
Social Media needs to be decentralized behind the scene, users must not feel it.
Sure you lose everything from the dying instance. Everything is temporary. I lost so much karma leaving Reddit, but it's all nothing, especially here where you can post and comment at any karma
If you're worried about losing your posts, back up better
You lose the communities you were subscribed to, the block list you build...
This seems like a much better way, in many ways it would be more robust. There would be problems though... This would be even more vulnerable to EEE. Disputes/hostile action between servers could damage the whole website (I'm talking about maliciously hosting CSAM for example).
It's an issue with the current method too and hosts could decide if they host NSFW content or not with the risk and curation responsibilities that entails if they do (as we can see with Pornhub you can get in trouble for hosting porn stuff that isn't CSAM).
I doubt that if one server was hosting CSAM that law enforcement is going to be charitable with the rest of the site just because technically it was just one server. I'm admittedly not at all sure of the legal precedent here... But I suspect the site would be judged as a whole, if not by the law then certainly by the public.
It's already a thing on Lemmy at the moment and it's not as if people were talking about the various instances as separate websites when they talk about Lemmy.
It would be fairly easy to have a post info page that mentions what servers (including redundancies) the content is hosted on.
Anyway, the ideal solution would be that NSFW content has its own website (LemmXXX! I'm a genius) separate from the rest so as not to potentially create legal issues.
Yeah, unless I own all my own data, the Fediverse doesn't really solve anything. Sure, I could host a server just for me, but if everyone did that would it even work? Or would it collapse under the load of all the data whizzing about behind the scenes?
Or just have a bus factor greater than one.