Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing “All”. Although this doesn’t happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders “All” unusable in the browser.
This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008
Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under “Hot”. There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076
Now, the only remaining points for me are:
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Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/[email protected].
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Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.
It may make things simpler for the user, but at the cost of storage and performance of every instance in the index, which won’t scale well as more instances are added over time. I personally think it’s better the way it is. As long as you are educated enough to know how to federate with other instances you choose to federate with, you can keep your own instance minimally connected to only the instances and communities you actually care about.
Maybe a good compromise would be for such an idea as a globally replicated index, to be optional, so individual instances could keep it disabled if they wanted to. If you choose to enable it as an instance owner, the pain points for your end users go away, at the cost of performance and other potentially negative side-effects. If you choose to keep it disabled, you can still federate with any instances you want, but you won’t participate in the index. Or maybe your instance would be listed and replicated to other instances’ indexes, but your own instance won’t receive updates as the global index continues to grow. Since it would just be for convenient discoverability, there’s not really any problem with that. No functionality would be lost for your or any other instance.
I’d think the cost to storage and performance would be trivially small, not even a rounding error relative to the over server/host loads associated with an instance.