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iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
The problem with small systems is that they go away when the maintainer gets bored, dies, moves to a new country, gets too busy with life, etc. And they give the owner an immense amount of control, which isn’t always good in a time of declining trust and increasing hostility. At some point you get tired of migrating or rebuilding.
These days I don’t really like hosting anything that isn’t either under my own control or on a decentralized system.
andros 16 hours ago [-]
This can happen, even in open-source projects. The key is that not everyone has the knowledge or the money to maintain them. These mini-federations make the Internet much richer and more accessible.
iamnothere 14 hours ago [-]
How is decentralization not better than this type of system? In a well decentralized system, nodes are coming and going all the time. Nostr presents a successful example of this: there are tons of relays, and even if one disappears then your content doesn’t.
I have lost count of the times that I invested time into a platform or small community hub, only to lose everything when it later closed up shop. Many times the community wasn’t dying, either, it was just forcibly evicted. This usually kills the community, especially if it’s very small.
andros 13 hours ago [-]
The problem with Nostr lies in its cost and replication; the traffic is redundant (98% of it). The result is a fragile infrastructure; a "ticking time bomb" in terms of costs. Added to this are the typical headaches associated with any decentralized network (spam, moderation without a central authority, Sybil attacks, a constantly growing volume of data, etc.). Furthermore, it is dependent on relays (which is not the case for other networks).
iamnothere 12 hours ago [-]
Relays can be selective about the type of content they host, or even limit their hosting to specific enumerated identities. Most don’t do this at present (except for spam mitigation) because the network is too small to worry about it. There’s also no rule against expiring and deleting “old” content.
As for data volume, incoming relay data comes from users who choose where they publish, not from federated relays (as with Fediverse servers), so the traffic growth should be somewhat different from how things have played out with Mastodon hosts. I’d like to see a citation for that 98% number if you have it! Worst case, individual relays can limit themselves to registered identities or hold content for only a brief period.
I think that this flexibility will lead to a more robust network than the Fediverse, with some relay operators curating the type of content they host, with others going for a wide but shallow approach. Meanwhile users will be able to cross-publish to whatever relays allow them. If a node drops off the network, the content is not lost, and the original events can always be republished if that’s ever needed.
andros 3 hours ago [-]
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AAAAaccountAAAA 8 hours ago [-]
This is getting really absurd. Speak for yourself. I do not want those "small" things. Small means no one is using them. I want big, decentralized and reliable systems, built to deal with heavy load, system failures and malicious attackers.
andros 3 hours ago [-]
Is it better to have something small with a certain level of usage, or a network of millions of users where only a negligible percentage actually interact?
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
I don't buy it.
First of all, I don't use GMail or Outlook for E-Mail.
What would E-Mail/messengers/telco look like in small without federation?
andros 15 hours ago [-]
What is your goal? To talk with other users via private messages, in the style of XMPP or IRC?
These days I don’t really like hosting anything that isn’t either under my own control or on a decentralized system.
I have lost count of the times that I invested time into a platform or small community hub, only to lose everything when it later closed up shop. Many times the community wasn’t dying, either, it was just forcibly evicted. This usually kills the community, especially if it’s very small.
As for data volume, incoming relay data comes from users who choose where they publish, not from federated relays (as with Fediverse servers), so the traffic growth should be somewhat different from how things have played out with Mastodon hosts. I’d like to see a citation for that 98% number if you have it! Worst case, individual relays can limit themselves to registered identities or hold content for only a brief period.
I think that this flexibility will lead to a more robust network than the Fediverse, with some relay operators curating the type of content they host, with others going for a wide but shallow approach. Meanwhile users will be able to cross-publish to whatever relays allow them. If a node drops off the network, the content is not lost, and the original events can always be republished if that’s ever needed.
First of all, I don't use GMail or Outlook for E-Mail.
What would E-Mail/messengers/telco look like in small without federation?