This guy also being a perpetrator of bullying because he didn’t like moderation decisions makes this post a bit ironic though 🤷

Hmm, maybe they are running some developer release? I don’t think this has made it into an official release yet, and if so that must have happend very recently (I tried selfhosting Pixelfed about 6 months ago and it wasn’t available yet).

This is a planned feature for Pixelfed that is perpetually finally almost finished since about two years now 😅

Well, like I wrote below, it is basically about scaling Lemmy across multiple servers, with all the complexity that entails. I am probably not the best person to given advise on that though.

If our smaller instance ever gets to a size that is not feasible to run on a single server anymore, we will likely close registrations.

I am not against showing cross-post links like Lemmy currently does. That helps finding communities that you have not subscribed to yet (but are already known to your instance). But automatically loading all the comments as well seems a bit too much to me.

We are talking about a feature that makes it easier to view comments, so general concerns about the feed concept aside (I find it a bad idea), it seems like forcing people to block communities so that their comments are not inserted into threads they are otherwise interested in seems counterproductive. It would be better to only show comments from communities that the user has actively subscribed to before.

Like for example I might be interested in the discussions happening on [email protected], but the comments in threads at [email protected] is something I would rather avoid. So this feature would force me to block [email protected] which is the opposite of making it easier to read the comments from communities I am actually interested in.

What happens if a thread is crossposted into another community that your instance knows about, but which you are not subscribed to?

I think it would be good to only display comments from communities you are already subscribed.

Lets agree to disagree on the “natural” centralisation aspect, which is IMHO nonsense. And very recently the US empire was beaten by some tribes in Afghanistan, so I think your argument needs some further thinking 😏

The reason it gets so much more expensive after a few thousand users is complexity. Up to that point a single server can be used and the necessary sysadmin skills are not very high. Basically anyone with a few weeks of training can rent a server and run such an instance.

After a few thousand users it gets steeply more complex, when you need to think about running a database cluster and load-balance the frontends etc. Not very many people have the necessary skillset for that, and even less are volunteering to do this. So you end up being forced to hire someone expensive with a high in demand skill. Basically your operation suddenly jumps from an easy to fund with donations volunteer effort, to a must commercialize or otherwise fund venture that is highly unsustainable in the short term.

As someone who runs a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn’t as simple as that.

Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn’t linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred-thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn’t just a system operator question.

So no, unless you want to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial hump, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.

Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.

This is a terrible distribution and the semi-centralisation and gatekeeping by the established actors is one of the reason email is dying.

I think we can do much better than that 👍

This goes to the main developer, which is a person in Canada. But I think they have a few collaborators that will likely get on board more now that they want to set up a non-profit (?) foundation to manage the Pixelfed codebase and IP.

This is or at least was a problem with cross-posts in the same community in Lemmy as well. I think now Lemmy just prevents posts with the same URL to be counted as crossposts when they are in the same community.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/configuration.html

You need to set it to proxy all images.

Then you have not enabled to full image proxy (and note that it does not work retroactively). Here on our instance all the Nicole images were proxied correctly to protect the privacy of our members.

Lemmy does have a functional image proxy, but due to the storage and bandwidth requirements many larger instances have chosen to not enable it.

Tagging @[email protected] as mentions don’t work in post bodies, only in comments.

Would be interesting indeed to have a database migration script or so.

My understanding is that these groups are separate from the normal Pixelfed feed.

First of all that’s all hypothetical and secondly that thought experiment only talks about an app that uses the PDS as an auth source and data storage. It does not talk about your PDS communicating with another PDS, for which AFAIK a relay is needed.

Hosting your own PDS would be like hosting your own email, but with the caveat that you can only access it through the Gmail interface and need to use the Gmail relay to communicate with others. In other words: completely pointless.

Mostly yes, but people were a bit naive back then and many onboarded friends and family onto the Gmail service and that burned some bridges and good-will as for Gmail users other xmpp users simply ended up as if offline and never responding.