Besides two long-running discussions about standardizing how Groups work, there’s a more recent topic at Social Hub to be able to define Unbound Groups. These are Groups that are not tied to an instance, but are independent of them. With it the same Group can exist on multiple instances. The mechanism we are thinking about is a bit of a workaround to the limitation that Groups are bound to an instance via their Object ID (which is an URL).

Other than that, for a long time I am promoting a concept which I call “Community has no Boundary” (just linking to one comment, but I wrote many). It is about setting the concept of “Community” free of instances once and for all, by defining an Fediverse/ActivityPub extension for it. The “instance” means a server boundary, and that is a technical concept. With the extension we no longer have to talk about instances, but refer to communities instead. Each instance hosts one or more communities, just like Lemmy does.

But it goes a bit further than that. If you look in real life to the groups and communities you are part of, then there are many different types of relationships you have with them. You may be a ‘member of’ a sports club, but also ‘sponsor’ it, and ‘volunteer’ behind the bar in the canteen. That’s three relationships. In fedi apps we see Groups still be limited to ‘member of’ relationship and the additional privilege to be either a moderator or an admin. But it does not go further than that. With Relationship in place for Groups it becomes possible to better express the rich social fabric that exists IRL and build functionality on top of that, which takes that into account.

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