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.
Ether that or allow formeta-communities so that the 500 duplicate copies of “Technology” can self aggregate.
Which I don’t really think we want because it’s all about context based on the instance. Technology@slrpnk.net would be all about solar tech whereas technology@beehaw.org would be more science and consumer electronics.
I think the mods of each sub should agree to aggregate using an “invite”. It could also allow subs that have slightly different names on different instances to team up, if they are essentially the same thing.
I think that would self-correct when such a thing would be implemented. They’d just get more specific names, like solarpunktech or such. It would be an issue for existing communities like that though.
But with some fine grained tag support or similar, one could have a super powerful multi-reddit-esq thing that would make it easy to consume a specific type of content.
This I would really like to see, and be able to group my subscriptions into feeds however I want instead of just the default subscribed feed. And it seems like it would be relatively simple to implement.