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.
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?
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.
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.
Best example and reply IMO
I figured it was relevant :)
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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.
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.
This would be excellent if done right. What I am curious about is, where this will be implemented? On the protocol level in activity pub or with each GUI (mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, kbin etc) need to individually implemented it?
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.
I’m personally ok with multiple technology instances. It was weird at first, but I think that is by design.
I do agree that user management needs a redesign. I have three fediverse usernames that I created because I was a noob and everytime it asked me to login I would get denied and create an account. This would be absolutely awful for the normies.
This is where IPFS might actually be useful. Also this might help fight the trolls.
I’m one of those USENET greybeards and I think this would probably be a mistake. If you let a name be uniquely claimed by an instance, how do you decide which instance gets to be “in charge” of that?
Better IMO would be to update the various interfaces to be much more explicit about including the instance name along with the user/community name. So that it’s always clear that a user or community is at a particular instance.
We do still need better migration tools for moving users and communities around, though.
It’s not about allowing a single instance to own the name. The name would belong to the federation in a global namespace.
A possible scenario is to define multiple namespaces. Each namespace can be local to a single instance, or shared between many. Within each namespace, a single community name is unique.
In this model, each instance would have a namespace that it owns, and the ability to participate in many others.
The trick is in how we name the namespaces and communities. We could do this the USENET way and do something like <namespace>.<community>, so beehaw.gaming vs. global.gaming. There are other models that could work too.
I’m not sure how that would be different from what we’ve already got.
IMO the main feature kbin/Lemmy are missing is an equivalent to “multireddits.” That would allow multiple communities to be seamlessly aggregated for a user, they’d see all the content blended together as if they were one. I remember seeing a Codeberg issue over on the kbin repo discussing how to implement that, and I’m sure Lemmy’s devs are working on it too, so that feature will probably come along fairly soon. Then it shouldn’t matter much if the same subject has had multiple instances set up communities.
Reading this just gave me an interesting idea, when you start to post a link that’s already been posted in another linked instance, it will start to show you that it’s been posted elsewhere to different communities in other instances. This clearly shows there’s functionality there to look around when posting links, so I wonder if similar could be implemented when creating communities.
If the interface told you ahead of time that the community you were about to create has already been created in other instances, you wouldn’t be prevented from going ahead & creating your own version, but you’d be more readily aware. Honestly a win-win approach imo, considering it would help you find a community you may have been looking for but didn’t think existed, and it doesn’t keep you from trying to make your own anyway.
I understand your idea, but I think it would defeat the purpose of the fediverse. It would create single points of failure that are un-correctable.
I also think many people forget that Reddit never functioned any differently. Everyone seems to have forgotten (and I’m not saying you have!) that there are and were always multiple subreddits for any given topic. With slightly differing names. The only reason people are forgetting this is because eventually one or a handful became pre-eminent and the others died or became transformed into something more niche.
I think it’s a problem that will ultimately correct itself, but I think a tags based system, like hashtags in Mastodon, would be a better solution for tying communities/magazines together through metadata.
Another weird example would be r/soccer and r/football where soccer ironically became the defacto.
not sure that solution is a good one for this environment. I’m new but from what i’ve seen the concept of moderation is different and your solution is trying to engineer a reddit-like moderation design to an architecture that is fundamentally not reddit-like. Moderation here is at the instance level, not the community level.
Is this similar to the global DNS network? There would need to be a protocol to exchange and keep the list up to date
As I’ve said elsewhere the communities sharing the same name is just a temporary problem. As the system grows one of the identically named communities will become dominant. Because of that small new communities that want to have the same topic will be incentivised to have unique name just to be able to be found.
Good point. Also on reddit there are/were multiple subs for one topic with one or two gaining major traction over time (while others continue to exist alongside)
The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we’re trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.
I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.
This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.
100% agreed. I’m not advocating we “clone Reddit”, however I do think we should think about and take meaningful steps to improve accessibility to non-“techy” people even if that means borrowing a few things from Reddit here and there.
Because let’s face it, Reddit wasn’t a whole-cloth original creation of spez and kn0thing. It’s bones can be traced back to Digg, vBulletin, earlier BBS incarnations, in some respects even USENET - especially the way users can create topics/communities/subreddits on their own (yes, I know this isn’t how USENET works now, but I promise it used to work this way if you were outside the main controlled newsgroups).
I’m a smart guy. I’ve got a lot of years of internet experience. I can make Lemmy work, and find content on it. It’s cumbersome. My wife, is very techy by any reasonable standard but not as much as I am, has difficulty using it. She finds the structure unintuitive and confusing.
If those of us participating in this thread are the 0.1%, she’s the 1%. To me, this moment, this movement, is about ensuring there’s a place where people are free to discuss things that monied interests can no longer control. That’s what makes the fediverse great - we can spread the load and demand out and make it manageable for normal people to do this.
I don’t want another schmuck coming along telling me what ad I have to look at, or what I’m not allowed to discuss, or what app I have to use ever again.
I’m not the smartest guy in the room, I’m not claiming to have the answer only a suggestion. However, I am confident that this is a problem we need to tackle in some way if we ever want to achieve growth in “normal users”.
Completely agree that there needs to be some strides in usability. I’m in exactly the same situation with myself and my wife in terms of what’s needed to be able to recommend Lemmy to her.
I just wanted to get people thinking about a “product” direction and set of solutions to these problems that weren’t only aimed at replicating Reddit.
Yeah I think tags or some other way to congregate similar content from different instances would improve my experience a lot. I got like 3 same subs now on 3 instances and all their content is small, if those three were linked somehow say through a tag, they could interact with each other a lot easier and it would seem like one bigger community.
They may have the same name, but they have suffixes that don’t actually appear, such as @lemmy.world @lemmy.lm. I oppose this idea. Because when the servers do the defedere people don’t have access to that community. We have recently seen an example of this. It’s okay to have more than one community with the same name, but a lemmy grouping feature can bring. In this way, we can eliminate clutter by grouping communities with the same name. At the same time, the fact that different communities with the same name have different moderation understandings provides people with an alternative in community selection. Reduces moderation pressure
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.Indeed, does it not make sense in a fediverse where you can forward or change your account to another instance a community, be it called magazine or lemmy can change instance as well.
It would also be a protection.
Already now we are seeing some instances of lemmy’s / magazines growing larger than others e.g. selfhosted on lemmy.world vs lemmy.mlImage in a year time if the largest of the communities would suddenly drop out (database corruption, server takedown, admin issue) again all the knowledge / posts are again lost and difficult to recover.
Or does it already work that way and I’m still not really grasping this hole fediverse thing?
My understanding is that if an instance suddenly dies, all the federated instances that subscribe to its communities will still have the text content because they store copies locally. So knowledge should not just go away. Media is a different story though.
I think new posts/comments in those communities would then not federate at all anymore since the host instance would not acknowledge them. So the communities turn into isolated local ones.
If the host instance comes back and the communities are re-created, they’ll be empty on the host instance but I think other instances won’t delete the old content unless explicitly requested.
How is this scalable and sustainable? If every instance caches every other instance then it’ll blow disk usage out of the water.
