Right now, NSFW-marked communities are by default(?) not shown by their home instance to non-logged-in users in the community list, and even if you go to them manually no posts are shown.
Fine, but they also aren't shown to logged in users on other home instances, unless somehow already federated over. If you go to the community's instance, it can't tell you are logged in, and if you go to your home instance you can't see a list of all communities on the other instance that might be available.
Also, older posts that are marked NSFW can't be gotten by anyone with an account anywhere other than the instance they were posted to. When you subscribe to a community on another instance it federates over a few posts, but to doesn't request and federate older posts as you try and page back through the archive. The normal solution is to view the old posts on the source instance, but if the community is marked NSFW the source instance won't let you read the archive there without a local account.
But the system should contemplate new instances starting up.
Basically, what I would want is for the next page button on the archive view to go and query for another page of old results from the community's home server, before telling me I have reached the beginning of time. I don't expect it to fetch all of history right away, but if I am meant to browse the whole world through the home instance, the home instance should fetch stuff more or less when my browser would if I weren't browsing through an intermediary.
^ this.
I think you have a bit of a conceptual misunderstanding of how the Fediverse works. Just because you can interact with other instances doesn't mean that should be your primary mode of interaction.
The Fediverse is IMHO about community building. Federation just helps bootstrapping new communities as existing users from other instances can easily chime in and maybe migrate at some point.
If you primarily consume content from a certain instance, you should probably sign up on that instance (this also helps with load balancing). The NSFW edge-case just makes this especially apparent, but the concept applies in general.
This is the first time i see this opinion expressed. Was this the conceptual consensus? If so, it looks as if this has changed to "doesn't matter so much where you sign up, just different instances have different guidelines", and IMO it wouldn't make much sense to fragment communities, either.
It is very much consensus in my corner of the Fediverse. And of course it matters where you sign up.
I'd say, this is not the way users should be expected to interact/think of such a system. The idea of forums of the same theme re-created multiple times, or people expected to have multiple user accounts, seems broken by design.
It isn't broken. It very much works as intended. You are expecting a centralized system? I think you might be in the wrong place then.
Please don't be upset because someone differs in their philosophy. I'm not talking about a centralised system but decentralisation in the sense of offloading and failure resistance, while also allowing differing "communities" to have their space with the same topic.
Anyway, until i read your comment, i came across the question, "how to interact with remote servers" multiple times, and never once was it recommended that people create multiple user accounts. Take it as you wish but please also consider the possibility that whatever was once conceptualised is increasingly becoming irrelevant once people use a system in a more intuitive way -- it's now growing organically. Don't get into that once-typical "made by technicians for technicians" pitfall that whatever works in their mind would have to work for everyone.
It's the twenty-first century, so it's time that the machine has to adapt to the human, not the human has to adapt to the machine.
I think you got it exactly backwards. What I describe is a human sized and centered system, while what you describe is something that tries to replicate the centralized advertisement driven social media silos. Sure, people are so used to them that they have a hard time imagining alternatives, but imagining alternatives is why we are here right now, no?
Geeezus ... there i wanted to tell you somehow that the train has left the station. Well then, you being the senior admin of a specialised instance, and me being a newcomer who purposefully has an account on a general-purpose server roughly in my area, perhaps we can agree on the fact that the system seems designed to both handle special-purpose sites (which is a kind of centralisation) and general-purpose aggregators (which in effect acts as a centralisation at different aspect)? ... I will not argue with you but you will also not command others. And btw. why is there no federated user-namespace if it is so that servers are thought to be of themed purpose?
Have a nice day/evening. ;-)