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.

  • lagged@dataterm.digitalEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    It’s interesting how this issue is new (in my experience) to the Fediverse with Lemmy. With Mastodon you essentially have this uniqueness functionality built in. Because a person isn’t likely to post content to multiple accounts under the same persona. Instead someone will choose their instance and username and that’s where you can find them. Sure a user might have multiple accounts but I think usually it’s to separate multiple online personas.

    I think there is use in having same named communities in Lemmy on different servers because they could be for different purposes.

    But I can see multiple duplicate communities with the same purpose being on different servers causing fragmentation. Maybe we’ll end up with popularity wars and eventually one duplicate community will give way to the other?