So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.
How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.
The domain name pretty much is a part of your username, just like it is a part of an email address. Impersonation is unlikely as your name is displayed as @Flelk@lemmy.ml whenever your comments or posts are viewed from another instance. Your bigger concern for impersonation is somebody using lower case L instead of uppercase i and stuff like that (I and l, can you see the difference?)
(Unless you choose to have a display name, that’s for some reason the same on all instances. I assume even on the same instance there can be multiple users with the same display name. Not sure why people use it tho, it could easily get confusing)
This is how your account looks from lemmy.ca for example.
As far as I’m aware, if you delete your account it only gets deleted from your home instance. A removal request gets sent to other instances, they could in theory refuse it. I’m not sure what data the other instances store and for how long tho. I think your public stuff like comments and posts etc gets stored?
Now that’s interesting, only my posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml are visible on lemmy.ca. My first post to !reddit@lemmy.ml and my post in !startrekmemes@lemmy.ml don’t show up at all. Do those other communities not sync to lemmy.ca? What’s going on there?