When joining or returning to a service with potentially hundreds of servers, it’s possible to get mixed-up about what part of the network you joined on. Pixelfed has a handy new feature to put you on the right path again.
When joining or returning to a service with potentially hundreds of servers, it’s possible to get mixed-up about what part of the network you joined on. Pixelfed has a handy new feature to put you on the right path again.
Yeah, it’s definitely a weird problem. My initial reaction was something along the lines of “Isn’t there a decentralized way to do this?!” and…to my knowledge, there really isn’t? Like, you could distribute knowledge of user account associations across every instance in a peer-to-peer way, I guess, but that’s kind of ridiculous and pretty wasteful.
I think having small central services that improve the quality of life for decentralized services is largely a good thing, so long as they’re open source and not just some corporate product with vendor lock-in. It does kind of feel like a contradiction in terms, sometimes.
Exactly! Which goes above my pay-grade and understanding … but I can imagine it’s a fundamentally theoretical question at it’s core … for any given decentralised protocol, what’s the set of answerable queries a user and/or instance can make? Or something like that (like I said, above my understanding) … ie, what is and isn’t actually decentralise-able in terms of features and information that a user would find useful?
And intuitively, I’m guessing there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t really decentralise-able. Even the way the fedi/AP works, AFAIU … is basically just viewing local data that is a duplication of originally external data (that has been subscribed to).
And so the more the fedi (or its users) start asking for utilities and features, with instance recommendations and “Join-x” web pages being perhaps a notable example, the more relatively centralised services make more sense. Though, thinking roughly of the DNS system, I’m wondering whether a more robust system that isn’t really centralised is the sort of thing the fedi needs for ancillary user-friendliness needs.
Yeah, that’s a tough one. I have mixed feelings about it.
What I’d really like to see is a benevolent, impartial non-profit act as an umbrella organization that stewards a lot of this critical infrastructure. Non-profits aren’t perfect, and there are lots of questions regarding funding and sponsorships and the ethics of taking money from, say, Meta. But, I think such a thing could be really positive in the right hands.