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Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin) (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

This is the best solution I've heard so far. Any server could have their own Technology group. Using Federation, anyone from anywhere could subscribe to each of them. Or, instead of subbing to each of them you just sub to the !tech tag, and you automatically get content from all of them. When you start a community you apply any tag you want to be included in.

To me, the instance should be mostly invisible/seamless. Subbing to tags instead of instance communities puts the focus on the content rather than where the content came from. Tags would make one large meta community that simulates how that other site feels, but with the option to still subscribe to a specific community if you ended up liking it more.

Say for instance one of the !tech groups ends up with really good content and discussions and the other smaller ones end up with a lot of duplicates and low quality comments. You'd easily be able to see which one you'd want to sub to directly. In this way tags would make community discovery much easier. Instead of having to seek out 10 different groups on 10 different instances, you sub to a general interest tag and either that works well enough or you discover the one you like the most and sub to that one directly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@polygon I'll be interested to see this happen in the threadiverse side of things (all these link aggregation protocols like L/k right now). In the larger fediverse, this (tracking hashtags) is basically the number one way to do discoverability (i won't get into why but suffice to say straight search isn't fully supported technically and normatively). All the microblogging protocols (masto is one) allows you to follow hashtags (and the contents will show up on your timeline without having to follow accounts), though how it's done is different based on protocol. I'm curious to see why L/k doesn't automatically allow user accounts to do this, perhaps that was the whole point of the comms/mags.

@TerryMathews @Stardust