But, the theory goes, you’re not supposed to be reliant on third parties as you should be in control of your own domain (or within a few degrees of the person who is).
Large instances are what are antithetical to decentralisation.
Of course, the reality of it is that, it just hasn’t worked out like that.
Activitypub makes it next to impossible to “move” an instance to a new domain.
Every post/comment/and user is uniquely identified using the domain. In the eyes of ActivityPub changing the domain just makes each of those things a completely new thing.
You can set up a new service at your new domain and potentially get most all your users to migrate but they’ll be leaving behind their entire histories and as a “new” fediverse user they’ll only be discoverable via the historical posts for as long as the original server is reachable.
a lemmy instance can act as a censor and push the biases of their admins,
This is a strength of the federated model. In an ideal world instances are small and a user’s values align with those of their instance’s admins.
The problem here is that a single instance has grown so large that a decision like this has had such an impact.
There’s a lesson to be learned here: don’t push a massive update close to the holidays because, ya know, you might break federation and go on vacation for a week.
I mean, no one has forced any admins to deploy a new version. But yeah, this is an annoying one.
It seems the majority of the torrents with poor seeder count are in the 1.5TB+ range. I just simply don’t have the storage for that. Most everything in the 0-300GB range is pretty well covered.
Don’t forget the crypto bros.