Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing "All". Although this doesn't happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders "All" unusable in the browser.

This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008

Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under "Hot". There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076

Now, the only remaining points for me are:

Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/[email protected].
Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.

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[–] funkyb 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I posted this in Ask Lemmy but since it didn't get traction I'm gonna piggyback on the visibility of this thread:

As i learn my way around ActivityPub based services, what stands out to me the most is federation is very much exposed to the users. (That, or I still just haven’t wrapped my head around the architecture details and how they manifest in terms of user experience.)

Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’. What I mean by that is - right now if there’s a community I would enjoy participating in that is located on a different instance, in order to do that I need to (a) know it exists in the first place, (b) know what instance it is on, and (c) explicitly tell my instance about its address in order to join.

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index? And if something like that existed, couldn’t that push what is an inherently more technical detail to lower levels of the implementation, and make for a simpler UX by allowing every instance to expose a more complete list of communities to users from directly within whatever instance they choose to use?

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

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index?

Sure, this and anything else is possible as long as people have the motivation and knowledge to pursue and implement it.

Something similar to DNS standards could work for Fediverse sites. In fact, why not piggyback on DNS like the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and even openpgp4fpr / KeyOxide standards. DNS itself fulfills the first two requirements:

Some form of "master index" - check! ✅
Replicated across "instances" - check! ✅ ... in a sense ...

If you consider: Zone Transfer / AXFR a form of "replication"
If you consider DNS servers a "node" / "instance"... rather than just a Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse "instance"

For the second point about DNS zone transfer... it used to be the case that anyone could issue the AXFR request to a DNS server. However, this basically dumps all the records on a DNS server's zonefile for that domain. So, it's often disallowed nowadays because it discloses all hosts in the zone file, some of which might be considered private by the domain owner. Instead, server admins usually configure this to only be allowed by trusted IP addresses of other hosts. (I guess it's a very crude form of "web of trust" based on IP allow lists and the whims of a SysAdmin.)

Maybe the Fediverse has use for piggybacking on DNS via TXT records for some use cases. However, it's likely that some other decentralized method of replication might be invented specifically for federation with other ActivityPub servers.

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