In the last week I have seen solar punk go down and aussie.zone owner talk about stepping away.
I’ve not seen two places down at once that has made it to my feed in the last 3 years.
Is the self hosting aspect of lemmy a detriment to the entire environment? Admins getting burnt out or the costs becoming too high is absolutely an issue.
I know this is kind of rambling but what would happen to Lemmy if the major hosters all went down, and we all spun up our own personal services?
I look at it like this - the self hosting nature makes the whole system more robust because there’s no single point of failure. Lemmy as a whole will be fine. We will lose an instance or two every once in a while (RIP lemm.ee) just as you lose a schoolmate or coworker, but the system/environment lives on.
Depends how you define “point of failure”. Technically Reddit (or the other big techs) are much more robust. They are geographically distributed, have backups, multiple datacenters etc.
But organizationally you depend on that one legal entity. If they shut their big system down, it’s gone.
So I think in regards to unexpected/technical failures, big tech wins the reliability race. But in regards to legal dependence… federated self hosted wins.
Not only that, but if they enshittify (and they do it) there’s nothing you can do. Lemmy, by definition, cannot enshittify.
Yeah, imagine if Reddit decided to start charging for access to their API, overnight you’d have dozens of reddit apps suddenly stop working. You’d have refugees by the tens of thousands desperate for memes.
If this happened on Lemmy, people would create an account on another server and point their apps to the new server of choice. Much of the old content (especially text content) would still be there due to how servers all hold their own copy.
And if the Lemmy software enshitified, people could switch to Piefed or Mbin and still access the same content hardly missing a beat.