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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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[-] dissonant@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

The ability to create multis could solve that. I could make a local Edinburgh multi, sub to both of the communities, and view them together in one feed for example.

[-] overzeetop@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

That would definitely fix the reading side of things. As would a reader/aggregator app which allows browsing (and discovery) of all the Fediverse instances as a unified feed. It still leaves the challenge of propagating information though communities without either leaving large swaths of the community in the dark or risking multiple posts (for people who do multi./aggregate). The last programming language I can claim to have studied is Fortran (77, no less), so my hope is only that someone competent shares my concern.