When it comes to cutting expenses, government institutions are always very interested, so it makes sense to outsource all sorts of things.

On paper, sort of. Government IT projects are often seen as cash machines by private businesses where I’m from because there is often a generous budget and government institutions tend to want to use those budgets completely because if they don’t, some will start wondering if they really need that much budget or if it maybe can be shortened a bit… There have been notorious cases where there were huge projects that ended up being even more expensive than initially planned because the private contractors just milked it. And there is of course a lot of mutual masturbation between government institutions and big tech.

And government institutions tend to follow the private sector. The private sector has been pushing to the cloud for a long time now to the point where virtually nobody is suggesting or providing support for on-premise solutions. When every IT contractors says that moving everything to the google/microsoft cloud is the state of the art (and that there are 0 downsides to it and everything is 100% secure), most will not question it.

some countries have decided that all of mining industry, railways, electricity and water must be kept in government hands, no matter the cost. Same sort of things can happen with IT services once you burn your fingers badly enough.

Recently there has been somewhat of a push for open source solutions and big tech independent solutions for government institutions as they start to notice the downsides and potential security risks. And I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, there are entire IT projects where entire systems and solutions were developed to provide a secure software solution for the military (costing hundreds of millions), but then they want to share those files with sharepoint online…

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.

So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with “little dictators” hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.

And with reddit, admins don’t just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.

I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don’t use/sell your data for profit.

There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It’s important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.

This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.

Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.

I wonder where they all went after that

Gab is still around and I think there are a lot of private discord communities as well.

Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about “we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you” is really annoying…

Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content… You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code… But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don’t want on the server THEY themselves pay for…