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This I applaud as the tech in me. It will quickly become a mess in the real world. People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of m

This I applaud as the tech in me. It will quickly become a mess in the real world. People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc. Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. One guy runs a small pod with some people, kills it, 60.000 messages gone. How does that impact interconnected discussions? If I own my own data. (good), and I can remove my data if I want (good). Then what happened to a BlueSky conversation I was having with 40 other people? some of whom belong to other pods. Do the conversations remain with just blank lines where I used to be? If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my data and I cant remove it?

brigadier132 3y ago
> People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc. > Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. All of your complaints apply for the internet. Would you say the internet was a bad idea?
wmf 3y ago
With great power comes great responsibility. In a decentralized system you need to take responsibility for your data; specifically you need to backup your data. Bluesky has much better migration/backup/restore than Mastodon. If you want someone else to take responsibility for your data you can use a centralized system like Threads.
steveklabnik 3y ago
> If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my data and I cant remove it? This is true of any federated system. Once you put things out into the world, you can ask that others delete it, but that doesn't mean they will. Even in centralized systems, things like archive.org exist. In some sense, public statements are always immutable.
charcircuit 3y ago
PDS are crawled by relays who cache the messages and can offer a holistic view over many PDSs for client apps to use. If a PDS goes down the data would still be stored by the relay.
timeon 3y ago
> Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. It may have changed since I have been user there but, I consider content on sites like Facebook or Twitter, that is not really recent, to be lost anyway. Because searching or browsing older content was hard.
shkkmo 3y ago
The same criticisms and solutions apply to web pages. Various organizations provide "archive" services. Relays and/or AppViews can utilize (or be) such a service. Removal from such a service depends on that service's systems (and possibly the legal context.)

brigadier132 3y ago

> People will run pods on cheapest VPS and they will get hacked, run out of money, get bored, go broke etc. > Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. All of your complaints apply for the internet. Would you say the internet was a bad idea?

wmf 3y ago

With great power comes great responsibility. In a decentralized system you need to take responsibility for your data; specifically you need to backup your data. Bluesky has much better migration/backup/restore than Mastodon. If you want someone else to take responsibility for your data you can use a centralized system like Threads.

steveklabnik 3y ago

> If not, if the content remains stored somehow then I dont own my data and I cant remove it? This is true of any federated system. Once you put things out into the world, you can ask that others delete it, but that doesn't mean they will. Even in centralized systems, things like archive.org exist. In some sense, public statements are always immutable.

charcircuit 3y ago

PDS are crawled by relays who cache the messages and can offer a holistic view over many PDSs for client apps to use. If a PDS goes down the data would still be stored by the relay.

timeon 3y ago

> Imagine as fractions of content goes missing for a while or is just deleted. It may have changed since I have been user there but, I consider content on sites like Facebook or Twitter, that is not really recent, to be lost anyway. Because searching or browsing older content was hard.

shkkmo 3y ago

The same criticisms and solutions apply to web pages. Various organizations provide "archive" services. Relays and/or AppViews can utilize (or be) such a service. Removal from such a service depends on that service's systems (and possibly the legal context.)