So the main part of a computer that controls everything has a specific set of things it can do. Imagine that each of these things can be triggered by a button on a control panel.
Every company making this part of the computer has their own set of things and layout for the buttons to trigger them and you have to pay them money to learn what the things are and how to press the buttons.
RISC-V offers a set of things and a button layout that the community can freely see and use.
In this example a computer program is just the list of instructions saying which buttons to press in what order.
They should still be charged if the wrong amount of postage has been paid.
So if you send what royal mail count as a large letter but with a normal stamp instead of a large letter stamp they will be fined and charged the difference in postage.
In addition to features for migrating communities and accounts I think the ability to set up a special type of instance that just archives everything from all the instances it's federated to would be a huge benefit.
Something along the lines of an instance that doesn't allow new content to be created, only consumed. This way if an instance were to permanently close we could migrate it's communities to other instances from the archive.
This could also extend to migration of lost accounts, though ensuring the original account holder is the one making a request could become a nightmare of an overhead. The situation could be improved though if lemmy got some sort of feature for linking accounts across multiple instances.
I did something similar with Puppet a while ago, it also runs as root so hot the same problem.
My solution was to set up my own package repo for the AUR packages I needed and just build them periodically. This way I only have to build them once for all the machines.
So the main part of a computer that controls everything has a specific set of things it can do. Imagine that each of these things can be triggered by a button on a control panel.
Every company making this part of the computer has their own set of things and layout for the buttons to trigger them and you have to pay them money to learn what the things are and how to press the buttons.
RISC-V offers a set of things and a button layout that the community can freely see and use.
In this example a computer program is just the list of instructions saying which buttons to press in what order.