It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.
It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.
It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.
Thoughts?
There’s many ways these communities could end up gathering over time given the features of the platform we have. The most likely in my opinion is that certain communities on certain instances will take off and gradually people will focus on those instead of the many duplicates on other instances. It’ll probably be quite a while before enough critical mass builds up.
Exactly what I think as well. Reddit had multiple subs for the same toppic, but only one of them really takes off, and the others just fizzle out or have a slightly more specific focus. Same will happen with the Fediverse.
Agreed. And it’s interesting to see how communities are spread out even among related topics. For example if you see my post here with a list of crafting / maker communities, generally the first one or two under each heading are the most active and they’re all over the place.
.world and .ml and kbin.social yes, but also .ca, blahaj, sopuli, and various others. And that’s just the quickly-establishing communities within one niche!
Users won’t know what the biggest instances are though if they can’t see the true user counts. People have to go to lemmyverse.net for that right now, which is very anti-ux. This needs to be integrated into lemmy itself
Honestly, good. People shouldn’t be picking based on quantity, but quality.
This would generally suck and result in centralization, especially bad if any of the big communities end up in the hands of people like the lemmy.ml devs.
well, the good thing is, is that it’s way easier to just migrate to a different community than to a completely different platform like what happened with reddit.
The problem is network effects. It’s very hard to get mass migration so managers of very large generalized communities can get away with a lot of bullshit when they own the platform uncontested
This is how email works. This is how the internet worked in general before the big sites
The problem you want to fix is a big issue in computing in general. Billions have been spent on last mile auth and universal digital identity is still just a bit out of reach
Soon.
Why tho? If we can get standardized protocols and stuff, why not a standardized login system where 1 account works on every site?
Reposting from below:
Digital identity at scale is still in the research stages and requires a fair amount of capital. This is why Google and social logins are dominant.
Unless someone has a rabbit in thier pocket we are waiting for a decentralized form of auth. There are some but people don’t really like them. Even here.
The w3c standard you want to look into is DiD
Source: day job
I mean, absolutely - I guess what I’m saying is, it feels like a good time to bake in good ideas, while the fediverse is still evolving. After a while it’ll just be the way it’s always been and it’ll be harder to improve.
Digital identity at scale is still in the research stages and requires a fair amount of capital. This is why Google and social logins are dominant.
Unless someone has a rabbit in thier pocket we are waiting for a decentralized form of auth. There are some but people don’t really like them. Even here.
The w3c standard you want to look into is DiD
Source: day job
In a limited sense that’s kind of what we’re getting with the fediverse though - your account working across a number of servers. People don’t seem to be thinking about how to do more than set up a bunch of duplicate instances rather than how to leverage it. I’ll have a look at the DiD though… I’m a programmer so always interested.
It’s a deceptive problem. Right now you have either cert trees or pki signers. Neither allow a traditional login flow and making it like “the old way” using “the new way” requires enclaves, signers and a specific sku of Intel processor.
Currently there are (is?) content-only servers like https://lemmit.online/ .
I have been thinking perhaps the idea can be carried further and we can separate the user-facing front end and the back end.
Imagine having multiple front end servers (e.g. fe1.site, fe2.site, … fe5.site) all connecting to the same user database and the same back end server which serves the communities and contents etc (call it be.site for example). A user signs up once and can login to any front end server with the same account, create a community /c/whatever on e.g. fe3 and it will be accessible automatically on fe1-fe5.
This is in addition to the back end federating with outside servers. Outside sees the community as be.site/c/whatever and users there as be.site/u/whoever. (or maybe make an alias like www.site/c/whatever www.site/u/whoever).
Additional front end servers can be added to spread the load if there are many users. If done right the users shouldn’t even need to choose (or be aware of) which front end server they log on to, it can be automatically load-balanced. Another idea would be that special front end servers can be created to only serve API calls for apps.
I’m not sure if this will have bottleneck somewhere else, but I think this is an interesting idea to explore.
I’m sorry if I’m being pedantic, but so many of these discussions come down to “how can we make Lemmy be Reddit,” or “how can we make a federated network not be so federated.”
This conversation is the exact opposite of that. This is “how can we better optimize federation”.
I see it more of federation copying the structure and posting habits, despite repeating its mistakes while also making said mistakes worse.
What I’d like to see is global posting for some things (and those things using tags, topics, events/timelines etc) such as news and some types of videos. You’d still be discussing it on your instance (further unification could be done, or maybe just quick-switching what instance comment section you’re looking at/posting on) only now most of the time it’d be on a topic/event itself or on specific coverage of it.
If someone wants to post it to a community, they can make a thread with their own take (hopefully something substantial, but it’d depend on the community) for people to comment on instead. Thus better grouping and filtering.
Any text post, original content, or less general/common content would function the same. And perhaps posting links could even work the same posting-wise, just auto-generating a global link thread for people to discuss if they don’t want to comment on the community post that originated it (which hopefully means articles have something to discuss or at least are a very good fit for the community that they’re in).
I mod a sub that is niche and there are 3 other subs by the same name. We all agreed to put a sticky post on 2 of the 3 directing people to the main.
It’s no different than reddit, !beekeeping@lemmy.world, !beekeeping@lemmy.ml, !beekeeping@iforget.lemmy is no different than /r/beekeeping /r/bees /r/beekeeping
Right now we are creating communities with the same name as reddit subs to aid in transitioning. That won’t last forever, and as long as people use good community descriptions people will find the good ones.
I mean it is different from reddit in that now instead of 1 server with arbitrarily divided communities, now you have as many as are popular and it is more visible because there isn’t enough content. If there are tons of users are all in one place it might make sense for something like /r/bees , but here I think it’d be better served with a tag like #bees for all instances ( ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶u̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶/̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ more serious than I thought, but you’d need to bookmark that tag unless there are other features I’m unaware of). Whereas beekeeping does make more sense as a community.
I could also see it being interesting for unified communities. It would be mostly the same as now in most ways except posts would be visible from all instances (if federation is on and that community is not blocked). Mods would moderate their own instance (and nothing would stop users from posting to a different instance of the community if they so choose) though limited mod sharing could be a thing. So really it’s just something to make things less annoying than subbing to 3+ communities (hopefully with link/story merging too as my first comment mentions).
Also with divided communities in mind, why not make posting to multiple communities in one go (tied together thus not cluttering new, and possibly allowing community-specific versions) a thing?
Yes, absolutely. This not only limits fragmentation due to defederation, but would really help scaling as well. Having user servers lets those servers focus on being essentially caching servers, while limiting load on any community server.
