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Downvoted your comment just to test, they do get federated, though I couldn’t see it in your kbin instance cause I’m not logged on. But on sopuli.xyz (top level comment instance) and lemmy.world (post instance), your comment had 0. They’re created as “Dislike” activities in AP which is not exactly an agreed upon standard but other Lemmy instances recognise it.
This is sort of incorrect depending on what you mean by “properly federated”. Lemmy instances don’t actually filter AP messages except for from blocked instances. So if you found some way to send an ActivityPub “Like” without actually viewing or subscribing, it would indeed still count. Keep in mind, Lemmy isn’t the only software that can create and publish “Like” activities.
I said it in a higher comment with other info but try looking up a remote community that isn’t already known by an instance, without being logged in. It won’t look it up for you and just silently fail. If unwanted content is what you’re worried about unfortunately a malicious actor can basically just drop content directly into your instance without prior notice if your federation is open. This is why db0 is working on systems that will in the future work like shared blacklists (opt-in of course).
Anonymous users can’t actually lookup other instance communities through yours in the same way logged in users can. They’ll only be able to see a remote community if a user who’s already been logged in on your instance has searched it up before and/or is subscribed, but they can’t just arbitrarily make your instance look up other instance communities.
Then I guess you could configure nginx to not allow /c/ requests that have an @ unless the “jwt” cookie is present and do the same with your search endpoints. Of course, someone could just add an arbitrary jwt cookie to try and bypass it but if the point is more to make the average anon user not waste your server resources I think that should do. Without search and without the communities visible via /c/ everything within it wouldn’t be indexed in search results so the only way for them to see a federated post through your instance would be a direct link to one.
Basically nothing of unique value really comes from Reddit the company. Their platform is easily replicable (as you can see from the MANY Reddit clones other than Lemmy) and their staff are glorified powermods and repost bots. The only thing Reddit has of value is its communities, and those got where they are despite Reddit’s best efforts.
And even when problems are found, like the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, they’re way more likely to just be fixed and update rather than, oh I dunno, ignored and compromise everybody’s security because fixing it would cost more and nobody knows about it anyway. Bodo Moller and Adam Langley fixed the heartbleed bug for free.
Because they’re all different applications. I think the confusion here is between ActivityPub the protocol, and the applications that actually use it. The applications that use AP are all different, they have different data structures, hell mastodon and Lemmy/kbin are completely different at a conceptual level. They just communicate with each other via AP, but once they receive the AP message they convert it into their own data structures and concepts. And you should note that AP is technically a communications protocol, it doesn’t prescribe how stuff should be stored or sorted after an object is communicated between two servers and doesn’t really prescribe a way to browse through the historical activities of a person. These are things implemented by the application you’re using. So it’s not like you could just write an app that combs through all that data available on the fediverse, you’d need an instance that federates with all these places, then an app that uses that instance. Technically feasible but so far nobody’s done it yet, but you can see how some people reply to threads on Lemmy via Mastodon.
Not that guy but I see the confusion here. What he really means is self host which could mean running something in your garage or could mean running something on a VPS as long as you’re doing it yourself. You can definitely self host email. You can even run it in your garage you just need to tunnel through a VPS or something with a non residential IP.
Sure they can. But…
- How can they compete in a space where people are already there providing a service without trying to extract value from them?
- Why would one of these larger instances sell out when their userbase can sustain them and selling out is antithetical to the reason they started the instance in the first place?
- I and many people like me would be fine in our own instances. We’d just defederate. If, say, lemmy.world sold out those guys would just have to switch instances. It’s a pain, yes, but it’s possible.
+1 for backblaze. I use docker for everything and mounted volumes directly in the folder alongside a docker compose file. So I just tar my services directory with everything in it, and pipe it to rclone which connects to backblaze and has a “cat” feature so you can pipe data directly to the destination.