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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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[-] topnomi@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What if there was a way for communities to self opt-in to an aggregate name. The magazine settings could have an aggregate name that makes them show up under the aggregate tag. Kinda like a hashtag, but controlled at the mod lvl, and completely separate from hashtags.

[-] jcg@halubilo.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Trouble is unless that aggregate name has some kind of maintainer or moderator, anybody could just make a community and troll the aggregate name with irrelevant posts and upvote it themselves to make them pop up to the top. I mean, I don't know why you would but when they know they have access to tens of thousands people and can ruin their experience, some people just do. And if it does have a global maintainer, well, they have a lot of power. I like the aggregate idea, and actually so do the Lemmy Devs, but I think that it shouldnt be global. Each instance can maintain one, people can subscribe even from other instances, but I'd be wary of anything that concentrates users into a single entry point because that then becomes a vector for attack.