I’ve been looking for a free Reddit alternative and preferably one that was federated. I’m not really sure how federation works with this though. A lot of similar sites are just personal projects that people made as a hobby that lack a lot of important features or the interface was really ugly.
I haven’t seen how to moderate communities though but the Github page says this can be done, which I consider important since I want moderation to be done by communities and users rather then admins. If there’s a quarantine feature similar to Reddit that would be useful too so I don’t just have to ban communities.
I also think we are coming close to the end of this nice but long conversation.
We both understand that what a user instance does can be done by several small services. The latter gives you more control, but the former gives you administrative simplicity. I guess which one is desirable is a matter of taste. It may be nice indeed if it was possible to do those things separately, but there would still be combined offers.
There’s also the question of whether the community instance need to serve the user instance (name we give to the above combination of services) or directly to the client. The advantage of the former is that the community instance doesn’t know anybody checked the content in question, as it was regularly served to the user instance (from what I understand fron activitypub, the content is sent to the instance with the indication of who can access it). As you point out, the request may not need authentification, which makes it less dramatic, but I’m sure data recombination can get creative.
Note that aside from the theoretical question of which is the best protocol, being able to talk to a user instance is necessary if Lemmy wants to connect with the rest of the fediverse someday.
A disadvantage of federation is that one may end up serving undesired content. You mention whitelist as a crucial point here, but again it only changes the speed of connection with unknown servers, thereby only helping when discovering evil instances. When a trusted instance turns evil, it really doesn’t change anything. So the usefulness of whitelisting depends on the rate of appearance of new evil instances. I don’t know how much it is in practice, but that most of the fediverse use blacklist might indicate it’s not that dramatic.
To be honest, I’m not a big fan of Twitter-like services (I find there’s way too much noise in such feeds), so I never really explored the Fediverse surrounding activitypub too much. Any criticism I have on Lemmy current structure is likely to extend to other parts of the Fediverse where similar approaches apply. So I guess you could see my points as rants on that approach for public cross-publishing in general, rather than Lemmy in particular. I guess I picked the target I feel the most interest towards and that I think has the most potential to become something I could use a lot.
If Mastodon (and the activitypub fediverse in general) has the same approach of cross-publishing and forces instances to serve the content from third parties, I think it’s risky that they don’t have a stronger policy towards whitelisting that imposes a tight control over what instances are allowed to have their content served through them, imho it’s asking for trouble to appear. So I think whitelisting was a justified approach in case of lemmy.
In my mind, the issue with whitelisting/blocklisting is the limitation on the reach of the federation. People would have to create multiple accounts to access networks that don’t federate, rather than using one account that can access it all. It makes sense for an internet forum to ban users, block them. But it would make no sense for an internet forum to explicitly block their (legit) users from visiting other forums.
So, ideally, it would be best to find a solution that allows users to access any instance that’s technically compliant with the protocol without having to impose the burden on each instance host to carry responsibility for the content of other instances.