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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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[-] Otome-chan@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago

I'm not understanding how this would work with instances who wish to defederate and segregate their community? It seems like an "all or nothing" approach that instances who have defederated already wouldn't be on board with... For instance what happens if beehaw owns the "gaming" community, and then defederates from lemmyworld. Lemmyworld users just no longer have a "gaming" community?

[-] Admetus@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Best example and reply IMO

[-] Otome-chan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I figured it was relevant :)

[-] domage@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It seems like this concept is “orthogonal” to the current federation concept, proposed by the ActivityPub protocol.

In the proposed case, the instances act as a pure “computational and storage fabric” or some kind of a “cdn” of a service, without any “personality” incorporated in them.

So I would not say that this is “better” or “worse”. It is just another concept.

[-] jcg@halubilo.social 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, I think this concept is actually going to be necessary moving forward, some kind of caching/relay infrastructure, owned by others but lightening the load for other instances and providing a good starting point for newly created instances that just want a stream of content right away.