If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn't offer any additional resilience, it's not a P2P system.

I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that's easily solved.

If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.

The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that's a bad user experience.

At this stage in the game, I'm not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I'm currently on. I'd like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don't do it here and certainly don't use the same password for your email associated with your account).

Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone's passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).

Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I'm sure there's some that should absolutely be avoided and I'm sure that there's some that are perfectly fine. But I don't have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I'd love to join someone's small instance.

Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there's the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.

the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.

as long accounts can't be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances.. most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)

Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.

Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.

So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won't be able to support that load and will ultimately close.

That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i'm misunderstanding.

I'm on it 😁, well at least one little instance more (just gotta make the email stuff work, over OVH if I can do that).