I’m seeing discussions on other instances about how a “federated” corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.

What would kbin.social’s stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?

Or what should that stance be?

  • Melpomene@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    Kbin.social need not be anti-corporation, but setting standards that fellow federated instances must abide by / putting into place a “collective treaty of federation” or some such that sets the terms of federating with kbin.social (and other signatory instances) would be exceedingly wise. In theory, I have no problem seeing commercial entities as part of the fediverse. In practice, though, I’d want to see strong protections in place to prevent them from turning the fediverse into "Social Network Inc, but hosted on everyone else’s dime.

      • Melpomene@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Mostly, one instance creating a massive load of traffic, making the overall load on the smaller instances heavier as they pull in posts to which others are subscribed. I’m not sure if it would be a huge problem, though?

        • parrot-party@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          It certainly could be. Each server is responsible for keeping track of activity on the network. It hasn’t been an issue so far since all the “big” servers are relatively equal and the overall network is still small. If Kbin suddenly had to process and record every single Reddit comment/thread, it would be a massive drain on CPU resources and immediately cause data issues as Kbin just doesn’t have the data capacity that a giant company is capable of building out. Federating all the things may not be viable in the organic future, but we would get there much quicker if a mega server started dumping messages hard.

            • lml@remy.city
              1·
              1 year ago

              The thing about federation is that every server basically copies any content that the users on it want to see. So if a comment/post is made on lemmy.world, lemmy.world sends out an update to every other server on which a user is subscribed to the thread/community/user. So each instance that has a subscribed user ends up having to process the new comment/post. If a Meta community came in with say, a million users, now every instance has to process the comments for all those users (that is, if folks on those instances want to see that Meta content).

              It is a bit inefficient, but it’s just the way a decentralized network has to function. I could see many people thinking that any time you open a thread, the data comes in from the originating instance, i.e. that your home instance doesn’t store the data you are viewing. It is unfortunately, and I think it will be a problem in the future as communities grow.