this is what i’m frustrated with. why do all these engineers let themselves be told what to do even if it makes a worse-functioning tool? that’s not real engineering.
“because they’ll get fired”
not if enough of them do the thing that should’ve been what got them interested in engineering in the first place.
maybe we shouldn’t call them engineers, but something else relating to being the one who does the dirty work for institutions that aim to steal people’s attention and decrease their quality of life.
and if they do get fired, then they should join together and make the reasonable company that makes good tools for human use.
this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don’t have to think about “instances”. accounts and communities are replicated across servers.
you already share water with them though. how is this any different? more seriously though, you already share internet infrastructure with them. the packets you just sent to make that comment could have been sandwiched between a “tankie” and a “fascist nutball”. that’s just the way it is man, there have always been crazy humans.
no, you’re misunderstanding. that shouldn’t be how it works. there shouldn’t be any difference between the software on each instance such that it make your data insecure. this is how bitcoin works. this is why anyone can spin up a bitcoin instance and have it start contributing to the bitcoin blockchain and you as a user don’t have to “trust” that particular node. trust is built into the distributed software architecture. you don’t “choose” a set of bitcoin nodes. you don’t “choose” your CDN or DNS servers.
everyone does not have all the duplicated data. they only have the data that they need – the data requested by a user who happens to be using some instance.
handling defederating is a good point. there could be malicious nodes that would be damaging to the network. i suppose there could be a community-mainted ledger of known malicious nodes (similar to minecraft usernames of known hackers), and the admins of the servers would maintain a blacklist. (obviously you configure that your instance’s blacklist would be automatically synced with this ledger)
the mega community idea could be good. where is this being discussed?
I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works)
yes, exactly! when you use the internet, you don’t manually choose which ISPs to route through. you can pick which DNS servers to use but you don’t have to. when you use youtube, netflix, or facebook, you don’t choose which CDNs to use.
the tankie instance or the nutballs on the fascist instance
here you reveal a conceptual misunderstanding, or rather, a part of the lemmy architecture which i disagree with. there shouldn’t be a concept of a “interest X instance” etc. it should be similar to a distributed storage model. so the concept of a community is not per-instance, it’s just an abstract thing that exists in conceptual space.
This is all different when building a social network
wait you want censorship in a social network? also, the architecture i’m describing does not do away with moderation and social structure. what about it makes you think that to be the case?
i do not want to strip out the functionality of communities having mods that moderate the discourse and ban malicious users etc. it sounds like you misunderstood what i was proposing.
you connect to some lemmy instance on your web browser
the client application (lemmy web app) authenticates your login credentials by first checking its own user database, if it doesn’t find you (which it should because by default you’d be connecting to an instance that you’ve already used, and if done through a mobile app for example it would automatically find the best instance to use by lowest latency), it send out a message to the nodes(instances) that it knows about, searching for your user, recursively, when found, sent back and stored in each node that was part of the searching. (there’d be some threshold of tree depth so the unsuccessful branches don’t keep going forever, and some other algorithmic details to prevent redundant network activity)
you navigate to your subscribed communities feed, lemmy shows you the posts that are already on the node that you are directly connected to, then asynchronously sends out a request to the surrounding nodes to pull more posts from those communities, recursively reaching out to adjacent nodes, again avoiding repeatedly hitting the same node via algorithmic details which we can discuss further if you wish, sending back the info up the tree to your primary node. now a bunch of servers have duplicated community data, like a distributed storage system, but you, the user, don’t know about all that stuff that just happened behind the scenes. your GUI is updated accordingly
now you can interact with these posts, make new posts, and each interaction will be sent out to all the relevant nodes in a reverse process.
another user on the other end can visit some community that you just posted to, and a request will again be propagated through the network, but starting from his node, and eventually reaching some node that has your new post.
the advantages of this:
if a node goes down, not all of the community and user data is lost, because its neighbor nodes have replicated the data
if i am hosting a node, and have limited bandwidth and storage, i can specify limits so that my network is not unintentionally DoSed. so this implies that when the prior-described processes are occurring, some instances will not store the data they are pushing through, which is fine, and one of the intended features of this distributed architecture
similar to previous point, each instance can have a whitelist or blacklist of communities (for either storage and/or data passing), defined by the admin, if he/she wishes to tailor the content for example to keep it related to content they are interested in rather than being forced to serve everyone on the network. it’s like if someone wants to help a little bit but they don’t have all the bandwidth and storage in the world, they can, instead of having to handle traffic for a bunch of irrelevant-to-them communities.
ok, you make good points, but i feel like the algorithm could work to not have the system grind to a halt. i’d have to look at other examples where this has been done. but maybe i am overly-optimistic and it’s not possible.
who would pay for those nodes you are querying
the people who are already running nodes, like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, me, etc. i run some services on my home server that i let anyone use, because i have the hardware and the bandwidth to be able to afford it. there are enough people who have the necessary hardware and bandwidth to contribute to it at minimal detriment to them. it’s already an open-source project where people volunteer their time to code it.
i’ll read up on oxen network.
in an anonymous way
wait who said anything about anonymous? what are talking about being anonymous? there would still be user accounts.
if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me
this is already what is done, except that the data is not stored in a replicated and distributed manor. you get all the posts in the world of a community of an instance. it is one server, with all the data stored on its harddrive, like a traditional website. in what i’m proposing, this is also what would happen in many cases, because the thing wouldn’t requery the entire network every time you request posts, there would be a time threshold, like how posts are cached on your local mobile device for most social media apps. posts would be cached on the server.
now, yes, this architecture would in fact result in more network traffic occurring between each and every node, as they receive updates about events on other nodes. so that would be extra burden upon the hosts. but i believe it is something we can work through.
but the big phone manufacturers don’t realize there’s a market for this and they completely neglect that. or rather, they know that there’s a market for it but they know it won’t make them enough profit so they stick with the mainstream, which is a huge shame. i’m sure that there are engineers working at google, samsung, etc. who would love to work on smaller phones, phones with other unique hardware such as trackballs, but aren’t able to because of “turn everything into money” mindset.
sorry man i guess people will just never learn how the voting system works (i upvoted you). i obviously understand some people like big phones, phablets, if you will. and that’s fine. i still use my phablet for media and stuff.
I like the feeling of holding and using a phone in one hand. I am using a Pixel 5 right now, but it feels a bit too large for me. I know nobody makes phone that small like the iPhone 4S or the Samsung S3 mini anymore, but is there at least a phone smaller than the Pixel 5? Maybe around the size of a iPhone 12/13 mini?...
unihertz jelly 2. unihertz also some other small phones. also has a headphone jack, fm radio, wrist strap, customizable LED, programmable hardware button.
lemmy.world blocked the largest piracy community in all of lemmy (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/2881638...
Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible (stackdiary.com)
Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down (i.imgur.com)
very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za
The state of Playstore (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Ads upon ads upon ads
Ordered 20+ groceries from Amazon on Prime Day. Today my order arrived with each item packaged separately.
Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?
The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:...
important message to google, samsung, all android phone manufactures (www.youtube.com)
just make normal sized cellphones again, please!
Is there any good small Android phone?
I like the feeling of holding and using a phone in one hand. I am using a Pixel 5 right now, but it feels a bit too large for me. I know nobody makes phone that small like the iPhone 4S or the Samsung S3 mini anymore, but is there at least a phone smaller than the Pixel 5? Maybe around the size of a iPhone 12/13 mini?...