What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.
The things that spring to mind for me are:
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Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.
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Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.
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Back-end build and scaling.
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Duplicate communities across instances.
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Account migration between instances.
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Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.
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GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.
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Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.
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How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.
The biggest issue would be data retention. Reddit serves as a real world database that stores all the historical content and search engines like google make it searchable.
We’re talking about petabytes, and lemmy hardly has a few gigabytes.
Who is going to store all this data, even in a distributed environment, the bigger instances would have to store a few hundred terrabytes (per year).
Text is very light and compresses very well. While instances may risk having scaling issues with photo and video, text should be very easy to archive forever.
Personally I think its ok for instances to delete older posts to save space provided that there are means to archive threads that users find valuable. For fediverse to thrive it should be as easy as possible for people to setup and manage instances without having to think about the storage space too much.
Archival of historical content is something that I feel should be handled separately.
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