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Transitioning /r/rust to the Threadiverse
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Matrix does not use ActivityPub, it has its own protocol.
Yes. Or it depends on permissions. There have been some ideas for voting-based controls over things like adding and removing mods.
The thing is that you can extend this to what if the instance admin account gets hacked? It seem better to have one point of failure (the mods) rather than two (mods + admins).
You can't do this if the community is tied to one instance. This is my point, right now you need to trust the instance admins, and sort of the mods. I think it would be better to just have mods. This means that there is a clearly defined source of control over the room rather than two levels.
You can still have names like this. The way Matrix does it is actually pretty clever. There is an internal ID for a room which should be mostly invisible to the user. But there are also local aliases. So for example you can have
#rust:matrix.org. But if thematrix.orgadmins decide that that room is not a good target they can update the alias to a different room. These names are controlled by the instances but the room itself is not. I think overall this is a good strategy, trying to have one centralized directory is a recipe for fighting, disagreement and bad results. Pushing the directory responsibilities away from the core protocol makes a lot of sense to me.I don't think it is a perfect system but it works fairly well. Plus at the end of the day most users are going to come from whatever rust-lang.org points to. Or what they find in their search engine.
Ah, I was misinformed. I'll have to read up more on it, because some less-than-authoritative sites claim that it is decentralized (as in, no main/client relationship like lemmy, but instead equal peers), but I'll want to verify that. Matrix claims to be decentralized, but I've seen a lot of misunderstanding on what "decentralized" actually means.
If you have any good, approachable resources, I'm interested.
The admin would probably just reset the instance from a backup. Or access the DB directly to fix things.
A mod doesn't have that control, they only get the permissions granted to them.
Right, which is why the Reddit model sucks. But with Lemmy, you can have multiple communities with the same name covering the same content. An enterprising user could even automatically cross-post everything between the communities with a bot, so it could very much operate as a "hot spare." I personally don't even know where most of the communities I engage with are hosted, nor do I particularly care because admins tend to only get involved when asked.
I definitely need to read up more on Matrix then. It seems I made a lot of assumptions that just don't hold.
Unfortunately, most projects don't include all popular communities. Unless I missed it, rust-lang.org only mentions their own forums, Discord, and Zulip, yet /r/rust has a very significant number users engaging, and that's where I primarily engage as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if many users just assume /r/rust is an official channel (it's not).
So are most users using the Rust forums and those two chat systems? The Rust forums claim ~10k users, whereas /r/rust has ~250k subscribed users when I checked today.
If I search "Rust lemmy," I get !rust@lemmy.ml, and this instance doesn't show up at all in the first 2 pages of DuckDuckGo or Google results. It might get there eventually, but it's a problem any non-centralized platform is going to have, especially if there isn't a common word used in domain names. So if something non-centralized is going to have a shot at all, it needs to be blessed by the project, and even that may not be enough.
I'd like to see truly decentralized platforms work, but I'm just not confident that we've really ironed out enough of the issues to really be successful. But I'm going to try anyway.
Yeah, the truth is a bit more complicated.
But I think the key thing here is that rooms are decentralized and can survive sever losses. If I create a room on matrix.org and matrix.org disappears it can still be fully used by other servers. (As long as at least one other server was participating when matrix.org went offline, much like you need 1 seeder to keep a torrent alive.) Of course if all admins were accounts on matrix.org then the room will no longer have any admins, so it may be crippled, but if there were admins on multiple servers then the room can effectively live forever and survive any number of homeserver losses.
This is very different from federated protocols like ActivityPub as you can probably tell where the death of an instance will kill any communities on it.
And that's certainly something I'm worried about. If the admin of programming-dev gets tired of running the instance, it could just disappear.
And I'm happy with using servers as an optimization, but IMO it should always allow users to host at least a portion of it themselves without a server. As in, everybody becomes a seeder. That way, if an instance gets hammered with a DDOS or something, the network can still survive by routing around it.