this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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153
Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin) (self.lemmyworld)
submitted 2 years ago by TerryMathews to c/lemmyworld
106 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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] 34 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] ElectroVagrant 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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 (on Lemmy, I don't know about Kbin). 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

couldn't have put it better myself (also a USENET oldie but w/o the beard)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 ., so beehaw.gaming vs. global.gaming. There are other models that could work too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

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.