Right now, NSFW-marked communities are by default(?) not shown by their home instance to non-logged-in users in the community list, and even if you go to them manually no posts are shown.
Fine, but they also aren’t shown to logged in users on other home instances, unless somehow already federated over. If you go to the community’s instance, it can’t tell you are logged in, and if you go to your home instance you can’t see a list of all communities on the other instance that might be available.
Also, older posts that are marked NSFW can’t be gotten by anyone with an account anywhere other than the instance they were posted to. When you subscribe to a community on another instance it federates over a few posts, but to doesn’t request and federate older posts as you try and page back through the archive. The normal solution is to view the old posts on the source instance, but if the community is marked NSFW the source instance won’t let you read the archive there without a local account.
That seems to be related to back-filling old post from before federation was established. That is just not supported and tbh I don’t really see why it should.
I think it should become supported, because as a user I would like to browse these archives. I’m not only interested in new content when I subscribe to a community.
If you subscribe now all other users on your instance can access the content back to the day the first person subscribed, so basically there is an archive. You are just an early adopter and have to live with the consequences of that.
Edit: also, I highly doubt that there even is a NSFW community on Lemmy right now with a huge backlog of content.
But the system should contemplate new instances starting up.
Basically, what I would want is for the next page button on the archive view to go and query for another page of old results from the community’s home server, before telling me I have reached the beginning of time. I don’t expect it to fetch all of history right away, but if I am meant to browse the whole world through the home instance, the home instance should fetch stuff more or less when my browser would if I weren’t browsing through an intermediary.
the system should contemplate new instances starting up
^ this.
I think you have a bit of a conceptual misunderstanding of how the Fediverse works. Just because you can interact with other instances doesn’t mean that should be your primary mode of interaction.
The Fediverse is IMHO about community building. Federation just helps bootstrapping new communities as existing users from other instances can easily chime in and maybe migrate at some point.
If you primarily consume content from a certain instance, you should probably sign up on that instance (this also helps with load balancing). The NSFW edge-case just makes this especially apparent, but the concept applies in general.
This is the first time i see this opinion expressed. Was this the conceptual consensus? If so, it looks as if this has changed to “doesn’t matter so much where you sign up, just different instances have different guidelines”, and IMO it wouldn’t make much sense to fragment communities, either.
It is very much consensus in my corner of the Fediverse. And of course it matters where you sign up.
I’d say, this is not the way users should be expected to interact/think of such a system. The idea of forums of the same theme re-created multiple times, or people expected to have multiple user accounts, seems broken by design.
When first subscribing to a new instance, a handful of posts get backfill synced. I think it would make sense to also backfill the comments for those posts.
