Found a good image explanation of this whole thing.
Edit: update image to use light theme.
Credit goes to @[email protected]
Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn't find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):
- how do you ban someone?
- what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
- how do you even block an instance?
- what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
- say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in [email protected]? does it even work?
- i haven't found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
- what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
- can i pull it back?
- what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
