Comment on Sibling communities: A middle way
sj_zero 1 year ago
The technical solution I would prefer would be something more like communities set up like hashtags on mastodon. You could set up a community in the way that it's set up now, or you could set up a global community where every individual instance can subscribe to the posts that are marked for a certain topic, and it would be a distributed community where no one instance has all the political power, and if any instance goes down then the rest of the instances just continue on.
fresh@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s an interesting proposal. I think I need to understand it better. Could you describe to me in what ways this would be better?
sj_zero 1 year ago
With the way things are set up right now, a community is centered on a server. This means that if that server goes down, your community disappears. If someone else creates the same community elsewhere, the community is split. If you're on server A and community is on server B but you're defederates then you can't participate at all, even if person on server C would be ok with you participating.
If the community was a Commons then no single server going down could eliminate the community. Individual servers could have mods for their portion of the community so each local community would have control over what they see and if the local community trusts other local community mods then that could be outsourced. Regardless, servers can get what they want to see -- gaming at exploding-heads and gaming at hexbear could coexist in a superimposed state, and servers that are kosher with both extremes would see everything, servers that are kosher with one extreme or the other would see what they're comfortable with, and servers not comfortable with either extreme could see nothing from either while still having a unified community regardless.
This sort of decentralization is why the broader fediverse works well. Lemmy as it currently operates isn't really decentralized since the majority of the power is aggregated into a limited number of servers who have the popular communities.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Very good point