Hey all, so I’ve been trying to embrace the fediverse life. My background - I’ve been on the internet since pre-WWW, so I’ve seen it all.
I think there’s a structural issue in the design of Lemmy, that’s still correctable now but won’t be if it gets much bigger. In short, I think we’re federating the wrong data.
For those of you who used USENET back in the early days, when your ISP maintained a local copy of it, I think you’ll pick up where I’m going with this fairly quickly. But I know there aren’t a ton of us graybeards so I’ll try to explain in detail.
As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.
This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.
This would eliminate the largest pain point/learning curve that Lemmy has vs Reddit.
Open to thought. And I’ll admit this isn’t fully fleshed out, it was just something I was thinking about as I was driving home from work tonight
Lemmy is good, but it could be great.
I am glad I read through the comments first because this is what I was going to suggest. Because you may not want to see all the comms post because some are more friendly then others and some may only post in an language you don’t understand. With tags you can discover all the comms or even create one feed with comms like #tech #English #Japan you never even sub to them unless you need to manage those particular comms/posts with those tags.
We could make it possible to group tags so there are multiple feeds and you can pick to see all feeds or one or many that you have created. It will be like groupings all of the comms/post you like together to one community but making it very personal because you may only care about tech in Japan but you want to have all the news from your country and maybe do not care what country memes comes from. But if you really want to mange them by comms then that should be an option to. So the tags will be a tool to discovering comms instead then.