What's stopping Reddit from just nuking it and deleting all the posts in one day?
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
40 points (95.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35703 readers
1334 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Money and rules around said money. Reddit might not be profitable but it's still a business. They have a team of people who's job is to make sure the business continues. Spez can do a lot of stuff but he'd have a rebellion if he tried to press the off button. And he'd have a lot of debts.
"Lehman Brothers might not be profitable but it's still a business"
Also, search LLC.
Money is a trivial obstacle to overcome for many people. There's nothing stopping Elon from deleting every tweet, for example, because Twitter is no longer public and it is genuinely his property.
Considering the current state of affairs, if Reddit nuked all posts they'd restore them in a day or two lol
What's stopping someone from scraping lemmy.world and creating another archive site?
Lethargy and technical illiteracy I guess?
Short answer -- nothing.
Longer answer -- Those communities, posts and comments will still exist on the other servers, but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.
So you would still be able to see the posts and their comments on other servers?
We got to see exactly what would happen a week ago when Beehaw defederated from lemmyworld. For us (on lemmyworld) it was like if that server had disappeared. Comments from beehaw stayed on the list, but new content from them (comments or posts) didnt show.
Damn that sucks
Yep, but if you reply to said post, only other users on YOUR instance will see those comments. Any other instance and it would be like you didn't reply at all.
OK thanks. I am still a bit confused at how it works tho, if they did nuke the website, where would the data from the post and comments be stored
So trying to not go into the technical details too much but when two instances federate with each other, they literally share all of the community, post and comment data with all other federated servers. But it's the job of the host do manage that passing of data.
Now once the host decides to go offline, that activity of informing all other instances of "hey here's something new about XYZ community!" no longer happens, but each instance still has the historical data from prior to them going offline. So you can still see that old data and still technically reply to it. Just that the host won't tell other instances that you did reply.
I assume its only text content that is shared between servers? Not uploaded images and the like?
Correct. Images are actually hosted on a separate service along side the instance itself. So if said instance goes offline, all of the images go along with it (unless you linked to lmgur or something else instead).
Replying to my own post with an example....
Lets assume you have an account on Lemmy.world. Let's also assume you see some post on Lemmy.ml. And finally lets assume you have a friend that's actually on Mastodon. When you reply to that post on Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world sends your reply to Lemmy.ml and then Lemmy.ml tells Mastodon (and all other federated instances) about your reply. But if Lemmy.ml decides to go offline, Lemmy.world has no where to send that reply to, so it's only kept locally on Lemmy.world. The user on Mastodon can't see it as their instance wasn't told about it from Lemmy.ml as it went offline.
So lets say lemmy.world and then lets take beehaw.org (I know they are defederated lets assume they are not) for example. All the posts and comments which are hosted by lemmy.world on hard drives or servers, are also hosted by beehaw.org and vice versa? So the amount of data is actually doubled in size?
Yep. Add in a 3rd instance and now you have 3 copies of the database, essentially. It's just that each instance is responsible about telling the fediverse when updates occur to communities on their instance.
If the fediverse gets really big, lets say the size of reddit, it may be hard for all the different instances to store all that data on their servers
Ya, ActivityPub isn't without it's issues... but luckily it's all just text. Much of that can be compressed significantly.
load more comments
(3 replies)
But the host can initiate a request to delete the data from other federated instances. This will be handled automatically unless the other instances specifically block/stop the deletion request.
Am I right?
In theory ya, an admin could remove/delete the communities, posts and/or comments and then let that data federate out, and they would then be hidden on all of the other servers. But there'd be nothing stopping someone from still replying or creating new posts while that's going on.
I could be wrong but I don't think there's a mass delete tool for the admins.
Like others have said, nothing is stopping them. That is why it is important to spread communities around to other reputable instances, so if something like that does happen, only the communities on that particular instance are lost.
Not a stupid question ehh!
I mean that’s every web site all the time though. The owner/admin can always just delete it.
literally nothing.
What’s stopping that one person from pooping? That’s the real fucking question.
For 3 whole days nonetheless!
You're not supposed to ask. You're not supposed to ask goddammit.
You can always host your own instance if you want. It could just be you and your friends, but then you can subscribe to anything on lemmy/kbin. Then you are in charge of your own destiny.
Nothing. The admins giveth and the admins taketh away.
What's stopping you from burning your house down?
The answer is usually not that the house is completely impervious to fire, nor even that the fire department would come and put it out, but that you don't want to do that.
Burning my house down will cost me money. Shutting lemmy.world down will save the owner a lot of money. They’re not really comparable.
The reality is that a lot of lemmy hosts will rise and fall over the years, and a lot of communities will disappear with them.
Random question, but how would that work out with my account? Would I keep my username and just change my server, or need a whole new account?
Nothing is stopping me from burning my house down but what if the person who hosted this website / instance doesn't want to pay to host all the data anymore or manage it (or is that not how it works)
Someone finally implementing full replication / migration / domain virtualisation, that will. atm, there are other things more pressing for the dev team, though. (Anyone here who could fund such major development?)
Btw. i think more likely than big instances being abandoned by their owners (instead of transferring to a new owner), is them being taken down by some law enforcement or legal procedure. Liability costs can make any not-for-profit endeavour vulnerable to bad big player attack.
There may be a need for a service that backs up a user's instance content for future migration to another instance.
Technically I could. But as with mastodon.world I have made a promise to ensure continuity by creating a team of sysadmins and moderators with access, and making sure it can be transferred to them might I get hit by a bus, or get bored of this.
But I hope there will be a feature to export your posts soon so you can create your own backups too.
I mean... you're not wrong. Honestly I'm just not getting too attached to this account in case it does happen.
Nothing.
Likelihood of that actually happening: Incredibly low. Lemmy world is built with being the general server for a lot of people in mind. There's a big admin team. It's a higher likelihood for a random one who finds they can't afford to run a instance.
lemmy.world didn't even exist last month. It's funded by patreon. https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
Yep small instances are much more likely to just shutdown. It happened to me, I thought I found my main instance in dataterm.digital and then it just got deleted :(
I'll tell you what there's not, is a Mr. Moneybags investor at the top of the pyramid saying "I forbid you (admin) to act in any way that damages my future earnings." So without that guy in the picture, yeah, you could say there's nothing "stopping" the creators of an instance from deleting it. There's no one there to sue them for lost earnings because some precious monetizable content was removed. But is threat of lawsuits and bankruptcy to force content to stay up forever and ever really better than just letting individual admins of individual instances have total control? Just like any social media, what you post here doesn't "belong" to you anymore, you don't have some special right for it to stay up on the platform, it belongs to the site, and they can remove it, or the entire site, if they want to.
Nothing, but all other instances would still exist. While it would suck, you can just make a quick hop to a new instance (or host your own if you’re worried about who runs things) and you’re back up and running.
Compared to if something like Reddit were to be deleted, nothing would exist.
User account migration between instances was still pending in comparison to mastodon, I think?
I don’t know, but so what if they did? I’ve been deleting my reddit accounts periodically for years. I used to delete all the comments and now I just delete the account. There are some older ones that I merely lost the password for, and it’s a curiosity to read them, like “oh, that’s what I was doing in 2016”, but it’s not useful or anything.
With the way Lemmy works, I would be surprised if someone out there wasn’t creating an archive of everything available from other servers on the federation setup.
view more: next ›