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What actually happens?

If the instance hosting a community goes down permanently, then all of the content of that community will still be available on remote instances that federated with the lost instance. So you won’t lose old content. However, with the loss of the home instance, broadly speaking, the community is “frozen” and no new content can be generated.

The same is true of user accounts.

There is work to bring account mobility and the like to the fediverse, but if it happens, its a long way off, so you can’t really plan on it happening any time soon.

So, it’s better than reddit, in so far as you don’t risk a complete loss of content like you do if reddit bans a community, but despite the content being available, it is still single point sensitive.

However, as it stands today, there aren’t really any alternatives that let you get away from that risk. Reddit, the fediverse, forums (self hosted or otherwise), they all carry the risk of going down and taking the community with them. The fediverse though at least means the content can be saved.

Can a single instance handle a community of 100k members? Can this one? What's the limit?

Lemmy.world has nearly twice that many users. It’s the largest lemmy instance, and has hefty hardware requirements, but it’s entirely manageable, especially if you’re using crowd funding etc to cover costs.

We’ve hosted 196, one of the busiest lemmy communities (and an image based community at that) without any problems, with plenty of room to scale up if needed.

You may not be seeing it here because Lemmy is smaller, not as well know, and appears to be a bit harder to use and keeps out the idiots.

Yes and no. I used to moderate reddit subs, so I know how they could be. Lemmy is different though. Its mod tools are less mature, but it does have the option of 3rd party mod bots to help. More importantly though, federation itself solves a lot of the problems. Every instance has admins, which means that admins are more active and attentive when their users are causing problems, or when spam waves arrive. And instances that don’t deal with spam or bigots can just be defederated, so their users can’t access the communities at all.

Which is to say, the moderation tools on lemmy aren’t as mature, but lemmy itself mitigates a lot of that, and so it ends up being good enough for the most part.

However, the instance we’re spinning up will be “allow list”, which means it will be very selective about which lemmy instances it federates with, which in turn means that the only users will see content there in the first place are queer focused instances that take moderation seriously, and that will further reduce the reliance on the mod tools themselves

I’ve never seen anyone use a singular “through” as a synonym for “thoroughly”. Maybe it’s a regional thing?

The first half of your post is you talking about trauma you’ve received from other people, telling you that you’re wrong/evil/broken/perverted etc.

The second half of your post is explaining how you think it’s ok for you to do the same thing to others, because you do it “for the right reasons”

When you confront a bigot with transphobia pushed to the extreme, what you do is add to the trauma that every trans person already has to deal with daily. You don’t magically convert someone from bigotry. Bigots aren’t bigots because they reasons their way in to bigotry, and so you can’t stop them from being bigots by reasoning them out of it.

This little guy spent the whole time chasing grubs and bugs around!

I’m not going to raise my hand to moderate this space specifically, but I’m glad to see someone has made it!

Reddit (and this sub particularly) was incredibly helpful to me when I was trying to access information on transition surgeries.

These days, I’ve had pretty much every trans fem transition surgery available (and spent my future retirement doing it), and it would be wonderful to be able to pay it forward and help others with information

Folks like you and the hundred other people also "just asking questions" or playing devils advocate" and expecting trans people to engage in a debate as to whether or not we actually deserve equal rights is exactly why this shit never works.

It's interesting to you because it's purely intellectual. To the person having to endlessly argue that they do in fact deserve equal rights, it's a shit fucking experience that we actively seek to disengage from when possible, because it's all around us, all the time.

You were taught this through? Through what?

So, broadly, what I'm thinking is two instances. One is public facing, (ie blahaj). Any communities hosted there would be visible to and usable by anyone on the fediverse.

And then a private instance. It would only be visible to users on hand selected instances.

People generally wouldn't create user accounts on the private instance, and instead would access communities on those instances through user accounts hosted on the allow listed public instances. For super sensitive stuff, folks could host user accounts on the private instance, but those user accounts would not be able to access most fediverse content.

Can Lemmy can scale to the size required if trans content was banned on reddit.

Yes. A Lemmy insurance doesn't federate all content to all users. It federates only a single copy of any content to each instance that has users that subscribe to that content, and those instances put it on the timeline of their members that subscribe to it.

The federation design can handle a lot more traffic than the trans community on reddit can generate.

I couldn't find much information on Lemmy's moderation tools.

It's better and worse than reddits tools. There are more active mods and admins that have less tolerance for bigotry, meaning that bigots get stomped on more reliably than on reddit. But creating new accounts is easy and locking down communities isn't as granular as it is on reddit.

Federation also allows an admin to restrict access to other instances that don't deal with trolls, or even to operate on a allow list basis. We're thinking of spinning up an allow list only instance to insulate sensitive groups from the wider fediverse, whilst allowing our members to access it.

Lemmy works by sharing data across multiple instances (computers) and it appears there seem to be privacy concerns about the amount of data on users that is shared.

Admins have access to the database for their instances, but that's true of reddit too. The difference is lemmy admins aren't selling that data off. And some instances (like blahaj) don't require an email address to register, and allow the use of VPNs. Privacy is best achieved by not providing identifying data in the first place and many instances work to enable that option.

What is to stop the owners of the instance shutting it down, or the data being lost for any other reason?

Nothing. That's the biggest issue IMO. Content that federates will still be available on the instances it has federated to, but even then, the loss of the hosting instance makes it hard to coordinate a replacement.

I have hope that as the fediverse matures, this will improve and user and community mobility will protect against this.

The only thing I can say here is that it's less an issue than the possibility of reddit just banning a sub, because at least most of the content is recoverable on lemmy.

You see, I’m an anarchist. I trust in the power of people to self-organize, self-regulate, and self-police. I am philosophically opposed to whole instances making the call to defederate from another no matter how Nazi or capitalist that instance is.

That's great, but it's not for everyone. What you're saying here is that when bigots appear, every member of the minorities they target needs to individually block the troll, which they can only do after they've been exposed to the bigotry, and which doesn't help them at all in the future when the troll moves to a new throw away account.

Counter intuitively, what you're asking for is exactly how you create spaces that actively discourage diversity.

I'm road tripping around New Zealand at the moment, so I can't reply in depth just yet, but I've been talking to @supakaity about the possibility of spinning up another lemmy instance that is allow list only. We could allow list blahaj.zone, and other safe instances, and host sensitive communities there. It would mean our users still had access to the fediverse at large, but that the sensitive communities were insulated from trolls and bigots.

I'll address the rest of the post in more detail later today when we're not on the road

I'm on holidays at the moment and on the road today, but I've got some ideas that might be helpful. When we're setup for the evening, I'll reply to you in more detail.