this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I'm sorry if I'm being pedantic, but so many of these discussions come down to "how can we make Lemmy be Reddit," or "how can we make a federated network not be so federated."
This conversation is the exact opposite of that. This is “how can we better optimize federation”.
It kinda is though, maybe not so much "be like reddit" but it's definitely "change how federation works". Separating accounts and communities would make the concept of instance even less tangible and it'd change them from a place where you "live" to just a collection of communities with no real attachment to you.
If the design behind fediverse is a bunch of instances that self-govern and manage their own users but can communicate with other instances that they want to, then removing the "users belong to that instance" is a huge change at the very core of a fediverse. It has nothing to do with "optimization".
Yes, it would be changing how federation works and I would actually oppose a change that says a "user instance" and "content instance" can't be the same server. It's a perfectly normal architecture though to have a management, worker, and database service use any combination of 1, 2, or 3 servers. This just seems like a decoupling from a monolith into microservices.
I agree with you.
The future is going to be different than one monolithic website and I think ultimately everyone just needs to relax for 6 months or a year and just get a feel for how all of this settles over time.
Part of the federated future is that we are going to lose content from time to time. Maybe someday someone solves that but this is what a link aggregation ecosystem with no central leadership looks like, and that's ok.
yeah I wouldn't be in favour of making that change to the software itself.. I think the features are good the way they are. I'm just thinking in terms of organising services, and the best way to do it - it's lots of servers run by volunteers and the structure is hazy so I think it's good to have these conversations.
I'm new to lemmy so I might be wrong on this, but say if we have one big community for a certain hobby/interest and the moderators get power trippy or there are other problems, people into that hobby essentially have nowhere to go right? Having lots of smaller places and subscribing to them all makes it easier to cut one out and be less reliant on a specific group of people.
That's true, but by separating communities and accounts you haven't really solved this. It will be solved if/when we get proper migration tools to easily transfer accounts from one instance to another though.
Separating the two sounds like it would make the problem a lot worse. Nobody would have a reason to create smaller duplicate communities anymore so things would end up centralised and easier to abuse, like what happened with Reddit. You could hop your account to a new instance, but doing so means nothing if there's only one instance of the community.
Oh yeah that's true, I thought you're implying that separating would make it more resistant to power trippy admins so it'd be worth it. I do like the smaller decentralized instances and feeling a sense of "community" when joining each (even though I'm kind of a hypocrite for saying that since kbin.social is relatively speaking pretty big for fediverse) but it does need more work until we get there properly, both in mindsets and in technical support.
I see it more of federation copying the structure and posting habits, despite repeating its mistakes while also making said mistakes worse.
What I'd like to see is global posting for some things (and those things using tags, topics, events/timelines etc) such as news and some types of videos. You'd still be discussing it on your instance (further unification could be done, or maybe just quick-switching what instance comment section you're looking at/posting on) only now most of the time it'd be on a topic/event itself or on specific coverage of it.
If someone wants to post it to a community, they can make a thread with their own take (hopefully something substantial, but it'd depend on the community) for people to comment on instead. Thus better grouping and filtering.
Any text post, original content, or less general/common content would function the same. And perhaps posting links could even work the same posting-wise, just auto-generating a global link thread for people to discuss if they don't want to comment on the community post that originated it (which hopefully means articles have something to discuss or at least are a very good fit for the community that they're in).