this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us
I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.
These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?
I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.
In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you're right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.
But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it's much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.
This one point about the fediverse that I find essential to consider when thinking about reliability. Distributed ownership of servers drastically decreases the chances of the fediverse as a whole going down (not considering differences in the reliability of individual servers). But each individual server has a much higher chance of going down than say an individual subreddit. This is a subject I'd very much like to understand better, but it's clear it has implications to the chance of any given post getting lost.