Hey all, so I’ve been trying to embrace the fediverse life. My background - I’ve been on the internet since pre-WWW, so I’ve seen it all.

I think there’s a structural issue in the design of Lemmy, that’s still correctable now but won’t be if it gets much bigger. In short, I think we’re federating the wrong data.

For those of you who used USENET back in the early days, when your ISP maintained a local copy of it, I think you’ll pick up where I’m going with this fairly quickly. But I know there aren’t a ton of us graybeards so I’ll try to explain in detail.

As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.

This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.

This would eliminate the largest pain point/learning curve that Lemmy has vs Reddit.

Open to thought. And I’ll admit this isn’t fully fleshed out, it was just something I was thinking about as I was driving home from work tonight

Lemmy is good, but it could be great.

    • DarkSpectrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      What if a post is acceptable by the rules/mods at instance b but the post breaks the rules at instance a?

      Options:

      • Instantly stop syncing? Seems dramatic
      • Mods align rules? Utopia
      • Mods keep rules misaligned and users seek out preferred instance? Most likely outcome but this would still create a weird multi-tonal vibe in ‘mixed’ communities at the user level experience unless instances can find a way to express themselves with a localised ‘style’.
      • Aras@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Maybe we could add some metadata, like tags, to allow them to cooperate and just block/allow certain tags, that the other sets.

      • jamonEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Instance level rules are handled at the instance level.

        Community level rules are managed at the community level. If a community follows another community, they are agreeing to show posts that follow the rules of the community they follow, no different than a user.

        Posts go to a single community, when you post to a community that follows another community, you have the choice of where to post to. The rules of the community you select would be displayed to you at you select it.

        It’s really simple. The intent is not too magically make everyone get along and agree to the same rules, but rather to empower them compromise where they feel it’s appropriate.

        And as a bonus, even if the communities themselves don’t compromise, any user can simply create a community that follows the communities that don’t get along, and they now at least have an aggregation of community content that would otherwise be spread across several communities.

        I’m reality, I think these meta communities themselves will become heavily followed as they become great aggregators of other segmented communities that have fractured the content.