I don’t understand how Lemmy intends to do it when the different instances are federated, if several instances create the same community for example…is that possible?

  • DessalinesMA
    1·
    5 years ago

    What if instance A wants to make a /c/news, and have control over it, but that name is already taken?

    Fragmentation means community owners actually get full control over anything they want to create.

    • muirrum
      1·
      5 years ago

      Ah, I see. How will communities across instances be differentiated?

      • DessalinesMA
        1·
        5 years ago

        With different identifiers. So if you’ve subscribed to both communities, you will see a posted by X to instance1/c/news, and posted by Y to instance2/c/news.

        Communities are totally different from hashtags, which have no moderation and anybody can put anything they want in them.

          • DessalinesMA
            3·
            5 years ago

            “Fragmentation” of communities is a good thing.

            If someone starts up a lemmy instance about star trek, and someone starts up one about breaking bad, both of them can have /c/news communities.

            And from my feed, I can subscribe to both startrek/c/news and breakingbad/c/news

            • DJWalnut
              1·
              5 years ago

              Honestly, I think a better idea is to separate human-readable names and formal names. say, the community ID is a random 128 bit string (could also be a public key if you do something neat with cryptography) and then the community’s human readable name is a mutable variable that can be set or change, and doesn’t have to be unique

              • Serge Tarkovski
                1·
                5 years ago

                So basically you want a distributed community, like, for example, what happens in the blockchain world. Anyway, you depend on the mods then, if not on the admins of a particular server. In either case, it’s all about people in the end. Also, what if someone decides that the mods of a particular “unique” place have broken things up / corrupted the original idea etc.? Where to create another, better place if this one has already been occupied?

                  • Serge Tarkovski
                    3·
                    5 years ago

                    It is a problem. Though I don’t know how big the problem is, but maybe it’s significant. That’s why I’m saying about community merging and replication in another comment to this post. We can divide the problem into two: having a backup in case of technical issues with the main instance, and community ownership / trust things. The first one is truly technical, the second one is about people and has no easy solution IMHO. What if the owner decides to kill the community entirely? Maybe that replication thing can help, one can set up a replica / mirror of a community even without notifying the owner, and that replica can become a reincarnated community instance once the original one is dropped. Not sure though how to backup user accounts in case of a dropped server with those accounts.