I wonder about this as well – because communities are tied to a specific home instance, that instance going down affects that community, potentially killing it. Something more akin to hashtags/labels wouldn’t be tied to an instance so they would be more robust, though you’d lose the moderation of a community and just have a firehose of posts/comments…
Comment on Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down
null@slrpnk.net 1 year agoI feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that’s easily solved.
If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.
The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that’s a bad user experience.
miles@lemmy.world 1 year ago
forrcaho@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wow, you’re right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their “communities”) weren’t tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.
thisusernameistaken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
no need to resurrect it, usenet still exists and has a bit of discussion traffic (and a lot of binary traffic) but we just need to get users to swap over. course there needs to be some decent mobile apps made as well.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Jesum Crow… Tags aren’t a new concept. Just group communities with a tag… is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
There needs to be a way for a person or group to essentially own a tag to enable moderation. It might be one of those rare problems for which a block chain is a good solution, because there would need to be a public ledger showing who is a moderator for a tag at any given moment.
nintendiator@feddit.cl 1 year ago
There is no need to own a tag, nor to tack blockchain into a problem to try and sell a solution. Ever.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
You seem confused about what block chains actually are. I’m not suggesting anyone sell anything.
And if you think moderation isn’t needed for healthy online communities, I invite you to visit Twitter.
rikudou@lemmings.world 1 year ago
I think it can continue even without the source server? Like, once I press the
Replybutton on this comment, it gets saved to my instance (lemmings.world) then it lets all the other instances know, includinglemmy.world(where the community is hosted) andslrpnk.netwhere you are registered.Now let’s say
lemmy.worldstops existing, my instance still would let all the other instances it federates with know, meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists. Though I’m pretty sure there are downsides to that (like, what if all the mods were fromlemmy.world? There’s no admin who can add a new mod).At least that’s what I think it works like.
miles@lemmy.world 1 year ago
oh really? does it actually work this way? if lemmy.world dies, can all its communities continue to live on as long as there are lemmy instances out there federated and subscribed?
Illecors@lemmy.cafe 1 year ago
No. You would only ever be interacting with a snapshot-at-the-time-of-death of the community on your local instance only. It is the home instance of the community that federates all events, not the instance of the originating post/comment/vote/whathaveyou.
miles@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ah, ok. So if lemmy.world dies, but !somecommunity@lemmy.world was federated to 2 different other instances, those instances wouldn’t be able to “talk to each other”? They’d just have snapshots that they could locally interact with, but never see anything else?