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 memes@lemmy.ml? 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?

[–] midnight@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a little worried Lemmy may not be ready for prime time. I've already had a few times where my post to another instance just vanishes. But when I made an account on the other instance that worked fine. It seems like choosing the right instance is more important than I initially thought.

Is this because the admin of one of the instances blocked the other from posting? Does it federate by default or is it on an approved basis? I'd like to spin own instance as well but depending on how interop works between instances that also seems like a poor decision.

I'll keep looking but a more informative FAQ would be great

[–] thesilencenoise@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

It may not be "prime time" but obviously the increased attention and user base will incentivize the tech and hosts to catch up quickly. From what people are saying, it has already been a dramatic change in the past few weeks.

I was thinking today that it's actually weirder that I stuck with Reddit for so long without really thinking about it when I was consistently switching platforms before. Google Reader, Fark, StumbleUpon, bulletin boards, various smaller blogs and stuff...

Now that I've made the switch it reminded me how nice it can be to find and explore new platforms and communities. Kinda wished I woke up a bit earlier to these possibilities.

[–] andobando@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level

Not possibly or very difficult from what I heard.

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? Everything is stored in a database, so crashes are no different than any other site. It comes back and its accessible again.

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?

You mean like host an instance for just your own account? The smallest instance for $5 a month should be enough.