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

submitted 2 years 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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[-] LostCause@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] NotAPenguin@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Nah, think of it like subreddits, there are many subreddits for technology, people will use the ones they like and you can easily subscribe to several, it's fine.

[-] kubica@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I can't form an opinion right now.
If all similar communities appeared combined into a single community I'd still be likely to want to still filter out sources.
But at the same time sometimes a place to see them all together sounds appealing.
It seems that I want both, but probably what we have now is the most flexible, forcing less limitations.

[-] funkyb@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] EcstaticHumility@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

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?

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