Comment on The free fediverses should support concentric federations of instances
Bluesheep@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Part of the problem here I think relates to scale.
If I invite a load of friends over to my house for a party, they might be in different rooms having different conversations but they’re all my friends in my house. No one cares who I let in or kick out, certainly not either of the next groups.
Let’s say I’m part of the committee for the local community hall. We let our halls out to clubs. Some of the committee go to some of the clubs. I might not be interested in what it is, but if someone I trust says they are OK, I’m OK.
At the local University they have a lot of spaces, each managed by the respective school. Each school has a slightly different ethos. Some of them might let their space to groups that other schools wouldn’t, but it’s not their call. They share some resources but not decision making.
We’ve got this problem emerging. The decisions made by lemmyworld or other large instances are generally in service to their communities, whereas on smaller or more focused instances the instance level decisions are the same as community level decisions.
thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Very much agreed that part of the problem relates to scale – and, great analogy! It’s an interesting thought experiment: if each school had an Lemmy instance, how would they work together to host communities and make it easy for people (in all the schools) to find the communities they’re interested in? If they each had a Mastodon instance, how would they share blocklists? And so on.
And great point about the different dynamics between large instances and smaller / more focused instances. There’s always a question of which communities an instance sees itself as in service to – and similarly there’s always a question of which instances and communities the team developing the software is in service to.