this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
118 points (98.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
5 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.

But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there's a lot more content to download? Won't they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?

And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I'm posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?

I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won't be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.

I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I'm as in-the-dark as can be.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] wyzewyz 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.

Let's pretend you run a small Lemmy instance (~100 users).

If you federate with a large instance, you (i.e. your instance) will only receive new posts from communities that your users subscribe to, or users that your users follow [1]. These are deduplicated, in the sense that if all 100 of your users subscribe to the same community, you only need to download and store one copy of that community's posts in your database.

[1] AFAICT. The current implementation of Lemmy seems to handle federation using the activitypub_federation crate. I skimmed the docs of that crate, but they aren't 100% clear about this.

the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?

You have the same problem with any data you put online anywhere: The people currently keeping your stuff online might delete it anytime they decide it's not worth the trouble to keep it online.

If it's important to you that certain information stays online, keep a copy on a disk in your house; check back periodically to be sure it's still online, and if it's not, you can always use the copy in your house to put it online again somewhere else. If it's very important to you, keep multiple copies on multiple disks hosted by multiple companies on different continents.

50 years from now on

Predicting what will happen in tech in 50 years is a pretty daunting challenge.

50 years ago, in 1973, all the computers on the ARPAnet (the predecessor of the Internet) could be easily listed on a single piece of paper. The home computer was still years from birth. The Zilog Z80, Intel 8080, Motorola 6500 and the MOS Technology 6502, which would play key roles in early home computers and gaming consoles, were just beginning to enter the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

All the answers I got were very useful and informative, but this one is definitely the one that catered the most to my worries.