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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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[-] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.

I think this is perhaps the most compelling part of your thinking here, but at the same time, I'm more drawn by the idea of improved portability of instance information than the synchronization.

I may be mistaken, but I think a fundamental aspect of the federation model is the independent operations of each community while enabling their intercommunication, and the sort of synchronization you suggest would be a violation of each instance's autonomy to a degree. Not to say it's a bad idea, just that I think it would better fit a different networking model than what I think the federated model seems to be pursuing.