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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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[-] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I agree. I think people come here believing their vision of the fediverse has to be the vision and anything else is a bug, but that's not necessarily right.

[-] dekatron@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

When I first came here from reddit, my vision was heavily skewed by what I'm used to. However, the more I learn about the fediverse, the more I appreciate the differences and the value of small communities.

[-] MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Imo that's kind of the beauty. It's whatever the people want it to be. You can curate your own experience on your end and the users sort themselves out. So as time goes, your experience naturally becomes what you want it to be. It's confusing at first, but I think it's actually a good practice in the long term, and even a good way to practice mindfulness in regards to your content consumption.