this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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The wrong thing is distributed.
If an instance grows to some massive size (for whatever reason), it will just be the new Reddit, the new Twitter. If that instance gets purchased, the exact same issues await as on Reddit or Twitter.
It's the back-end that should be decentralised while the front-end (all the user-generated content) should be uniformly distributed with backups across the entire fediverse. That way, if an instance goes down, the content and user accounts don't go down with it.
So you are suggesting something akin to a classic distributed data storage system (e.g. something like a torrent) which is used as a backend for purely client-side frontends? Yeah, that could work.
Another option would be something akin to mailing lists. All the data is distributed among the clients and each client is responsible for backing up stuff they care about.
That would work decently for text-only messages, but with images and video, data and bandwith requirements would snowball like crazy.
It's not exactly easy.
I think the easiest option would really be oldschool forums.
Yeah, the main problem is the storage required. A p2p kind of setup but with the back-end capable of RAID10-like redundancy, allowing for servers to keep varied amounts of data. With enough distributed servers/clients, no single instance could grow large enough to threaten the whole system.
As for oldschool forums - I think they'd just be a slight downgrade to something like Lemmy. You CAN operate Lemmy like a forum, you just get all the extra stuff on top.