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Comment by hgs3 | Hacker News Reader

> If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.

While not a message board, the Wikimedia Foundation does well financially, hosts lots of content, receives massive traffic, and has an open API.

> So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users.

Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing. Imagine the internet of old with countless message boards, but under a single sign on.

As far as content moderation, folks talk a lot about AI and the spam it will bring, however, there is also the opportunity for AI moderation.

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> Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing.

In theory, yes. In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.

Lemmy is constantly mentioned in these discussions as an open source, federated Reddit alternative, yet the largest Lemmy instance has 1500 monthly active users. That's... nothing. There are tens of thousands of individual subreddits bigger than that. The "Fediverse" isn't going anywhere.

The beauty of open protocols is they don't preclude for-profit enterprise hosting large instances on their own server farm. This is already the case with email: I can host my own email server or signup with a small (or large) or free (or commercial) email provider and still communicate with everyone, regardless of their provider.

It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols. They do it for email because due to its history, there is a very long tail of small mailservers that they need to federate with to be useful, but the big email providers are all working to phase out the "open" parts, with anti-spam measures making it almost impossible to self-host, and privileged delivery mechanisms like push notifications that require closed APIs to use.

The Internet is not moving towards open communication protocols, it's moving away from them.

> with anti-spam measures making it almost impossible to self-host, and privileged delivery mechanisms like push notifications that require closed APIs to use.

There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols. Ideally, a user's feed would only consist of message boards they subscribe to. Similarly, message boards could limit posting to subscribed users, approved users, paying users, or those users with a "certificate" proving their human - the latter would be akin to certificate authorities we have today who assign certificates to websites.

> It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols.

Not to derail, but that's the capitalist's contradiction: a capitalist points to competition as a theoretical advantage of capitalism, but then in practice does everything to eliminate it.

> There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols.

Of course. Locking down protocols is never required. It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere. You're acting as if the status quo is an unfortunate situation that can be resolved by giving service providers the necessary technologies to interoperate. The exact opposite is the case. Service providers are actively undermining open protocols (EEE). They are very much aware that federation is possible, and they do not want it.

> It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere.

I agree which is why it will take a 501(c)(3) non-profit to drive the change.

What's going on though that a $5 / month server can't handle 1500 users posting a few bytes of text. I realize we're talking millions of bytes that have to be processed, but computers are fast. Are the protocols inefficient? Is the code just really inefficient? What's going on?

I wonder how many are willing tonpay that $5 per month. The community as a whole is worth disproportionally less if it becomes 90% smaller.

I mean, why can't a single $5 instance handle 1500 users? 1500 users might generate a few megabytes of text, that's next to nothing.

It can't scale without spinning up new (heavy) instance. Its database is hosted in the same <<thing>> as the web server ( https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker... ). Note that it's a single container that exposes port 80 and 443 - the database is hosted inside of that container.

That makes scaling the main instance impractical without redesigning how its built, deployed, secured, and connects to its backend database.

Note also that adding other sites increases this load without adding users as polling for content constantly is likely more expensive than having a user connect directly (and use it for a limited time).

Why does it need to scale? Does my laptop need to scale when I open a 100 megabyte file? No, it just does it in a few milliseconds then goes back idle. What I mean is, 1500 users sounds like a load you handle with a Raspberry Pi in a forgotten corner. I just don't understand what is happening to overload even the weakest of cloud instances?

>> In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.

I don't know anything about federation, but what you said basically describes the Internet when it started, so I don't see how you can imagine it is not going anywhere based on that. Most tech starts as a "niche endeavor of a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds" (I'm also thinking of Apple starting at a computer club).

Federation and open protocols aren't new ideas, and the vast majority of people have collectively decided that there is no value for them in those ideas. This isn't pioneering stuff that everyone would jump onto if only it was known/available to them. It is available, and has been for a long time, and the people are not biting. I see no reason to assume that this is going to change.

> Wikimedia Foundation does well financially

The ever present nags to donate would beg to differ

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