Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin)
Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin)
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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I think it's a feature, not a problem. If you have multiple communities for popular topics, if one or two of them turn toxic or have unpopular moderation policies you have other places to go. Think of it like forums, popular topics had many forums to choose from - but each had slightly different cultures. Also since forums could individually be quite small, they were often a lot friendlier.
Federation makes it easy to explore different communities, but we don't need to import the bad parts of centralisation.
I agree that this is a useful property of Lemmy once things get going but I think right now what we need if Lemmy is supposed to be a going concern is a less fractured landscape so people can actually find the content they are looking for. Some kind of global directory might be really useful there, just to make sure people interested in similar things can find each other.
The easiest to search directory I've found is https://browse.feddit.de/ (although I don't think that picks up Kbin). A directory doesn't need to be centralised, it just needs someone to make a good one. I think what will naturally happen is one or two communities for a topic will become prominent and will emerge as the obvious place to go, and I think it's best to let that happen organically.
I'm partial to lemmyverse.net myself. I don't doubt the need for more discoverability, but I think recentralizing things is not in the right spirit.