I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:
Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?
Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?
Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?
So I agree 100% with this concern (and I think that in the long term a lot of this has the potential to be a bigger issue than is really being realized). At the time when reddit was imploding and people there were talking about getting together to build something better, I put together a pretty detailed proposal for software that I think can help to mitigate this issue. Basically, shift a lot of the load on an individual instance to be carried by simple proxies that can be run by the users of that instance. A bunch of people told me they were interested in this idea, and I was just now putting up an update after doing a bit of work on some actual code. If you're interested in helping or taking a look, here are:
And: