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Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by TerryMathews@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] freeman@lemmy.pub 34 points 1 year ago

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.

Hard disagree. This allows abuse by moderator abuse similar to how reddit does it. Ideally the UI would allow you to create collections of communities based on your own groupings. And search could be expanded to find more similar communities (ie: based on keywords).

The way loading/finding and joining a totally new community into a new external instance is kinda buggy.

[-] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, basically we need somthing like public and private multireddits. Public, so you can sub to one thing to get content from many similar communities, and private, for people to organize their own stuff.

[-] freeman@lemmy.pub 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah agree totally. Kinda what I was trying to get at below. https://lemmy.pub/comment/9124

[-] timception@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

If you disagree, how would this be different from google then?

[-] freeman@lemmy.pub 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sorry. Was getting late and comment submissions have been weird.

Personally I am hoping for 2 or 3 changes thst I went into here.

https://lemmy.pub/comment/2889

-1. Create multi-communities thst you can group together multiple different communities across instance into a single place based on whatever criteria. Basically like multi-reddits and allow them to be public/shared or private. This would allow the load to be spread across instances and different moderation strategies to take place without a single community becoming some weird power grab.

-2. Makes links to other instances and communities always open in your instance so you dont have to constantly create a https://my-instance.com/c/community@othernstance.com style link. Basically what this site is doing, but integrated into your own communities section.

-3. Like above, Improve search and communities to index basic stats before you have to externally find and, search multiple times to get your instance to discover the communities then open the federated link an subscribe. And when on a multi-community aid it discovery of new additions with a basic keyword search. This one is probably the most difficult and may scare some folks from privacy standpoint. But could be mitigated a bit if you can make option one public for others to subscribe to or use mutlis they didn’t compile themselves.