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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] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I understand what you’re saying but i have a different idea.

First, user accounts should probably be federated. Or federated accounts should be easily identifiable versus non-federated. Federation is pretty easy if you tie it to google, Facebook, Microsoft saml/openid. I’m fine with those options but I understand how others may not.

2nd, I think magazines should be collapsed until they are not.

For instance, pics.kbin, pics.lemmyworld, and pics.reddit2 should show up as the “pics” magazine. If kbin decides to defed, their content now appears to everyone as pics.kbin.

This adds a layer of abstraction that only appears when it’s relevant. Users could of course decide to display this info if they wanted, but by default it wouldn’t show up.

Moderation is more difficult, but I think federation has a place here too. A magazine could decide to federate, and the mods, with federated identities, would then be able to do the needful across instances. If things don’t work out they could defed their magazine.

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

I made a similar comment as OP did in r/Redditalternatives, but I like your idea even more. It's the best of both worlds if implemented correctly. Can it be done even without making things too complicated?