Following the other thread (550 upvotes and 366 comments at the moment: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417), one of the complaints that people had what that some communities only exist on lemmy.ml and don’t have alternatives on other instances.
Let’s discuss this and see if we can organize together.
I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.
I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.
As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that’s a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.
Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically “unaffiliated”.
What I am thinking as a possible solution would be to have some type of “community server”, akin to email list servers. The admin of the server becomes a “mere” service provider, and those that create communities are then responsible for moderation and that content being hosted there.
I believe that this would be perfectly possible to implement with Lemmy, so much so that I will add some of this functionality to Fediverser as part of my NLNet grant. The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?
Would you be able to prevent admins to interfere with moderation of the communities? Seems to be the biggest issue here
Theoretically, any admin would still have access to the server and make changes to things.
Practically, no. Anyone providing this service would be a hosting provider. If something bad happens at the community, they would only be able to claim it’s not their responsibility if they are able to point to the actual moderator who is liable.
Interesting
If communities were global instead of instance-based, instance mods/admins would likely still be able to moderate posts and comments hosted on THEIR instance (which may be important to confirm to local laws), but they wouldn’t be able to moderate the ENTIRE discussion.
There are likely some advantages to this (such as discussion not being able to be stifled by overeager or politically extremist mods), but it would also mean there is no way to globally enforce any particular rule (unless all instance admins agree on it).
I think that’s a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences. I have previously pointed out that the current structure of Lemmy creates a nice balance of power between admins, mods, and users. I think all three groups have enough agency and independence that they can follow their personal preference in the fediverse without infringing too much on the experiences of the others. In theory, as the network expands, stability will continue to increase.
I’m not sure about messing with that paradigm in order to implement something like what you’re describing.
So just to clarify what you mean. The fediverser-enabled instances would be current instances like lemmy.world, except with additional functionality to subscribe to unaffiliated communities?
Or they would be a totally new kind of instance with only independent communities? Sort of like lemmy.myserv.one (they don’t host local content), except instead of subscribing to communities on other instances, you would be subscribing to standalone communities organized in some kind of lightly moderated community list.
Fediverser works as an auxiliary service. Any admin can install it and set it up to run alongside the Lemmy backend.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of having instances that are home to users and communities at the same time. It is the source of endless issues around identity. I think that a lot of the centralization around LW would be avoided if people could create communities outside of their own “home” instance, and I don’t think that “just create an account on multiple instances” is an acceptable workaround.
Makes a lot of sense, I have to agree with you that creating multiple accounts is not acceptable. Most of the people already here don’t mind it obviously, but in terms of future growth that’s a big hurdle that we need to figure out.
I’m definitely interested in the concept and I would certainly advocate for SJW to give it a shot in the future and see how it is.
That’s a very interesting blog post you linked. Lots of interesting tangents which I’m not gonna go down. But I mainly agree about corporations monetizing identity in the modern age. But I don’t think it applies to the fediverse, because instances are non-profit. And quite frankly, I don’t see the harm in playing to people’s sense of community and identity in order to lure them in. It seems to me that your vision is technically efficient, but maybe lacks some of the charm that Lemmy currently has.
Well there are a few that are easy enough to forsee and it would make me wary of doing it myself. I think the current system works OK, but I am interested to see how it works out.