I am still playing around with Lemmy like I am sure a lot of people are. I have accounts on multiple instances to see how things are and what not.
I understand why beehaw decided to defederate with .world, I just didn’t think much about the consequence of it after it happened. Today I was browsing the [email protected] from my beehaw account and looked at the same from my this .ml account and realized I am missing so posts… Any user from .world posting a discussion thread for an anime I watch from, I can’t participate in…
I could create my own discussion post about the anime, but now there are two posts going about the same thing. beehaw users would be able to see and participate in this now, but every other instance will see two posts. Duplicating the same thing and splitting the discussion unnecessarily.
I love the power, control, and principles behind Lemmy and the wider fediverse, its just something that is annoying me at the moment. Its amazing for taking care of spam instances (70k users with no posts? yea right), but when one large/popular instance spanks another, it can be problematic. Thinking of maybe self hosting (which I am no stranger to) as a way to avoid an issue like this in future.
Still like Lemmy and wanting to push through these “quirks”, but just wanted to vent a little.
One possible architecture for a network like this is to have many separate federations. Another is to expect that all well-behaved servers federate with all other well-behaved servers.
The former is how IRC works: The 40 servers that make up DALnet don’t federate with the 34 servers that make up Libera.chat. That’s not because they don’t get along — but because those services exist for different reasons, have different policies, develop the IRC service in different directions, and want to stay distinct. On IRC, a chat channel exists on a specific network; a channel called
#linuxon EFnet is logically separate from a channel by the same name on Undernet. Your identity (“nick”) is your identity on a particular network.Email, on the other hand, sticks with the “all well-behaved servers should federate” assumption. If you have an email account anywhere and you know someone’s email address anywhere, by default we expect that you should be able to email each other. But, partly as a result, email has a massive spam problem that only the biggest providers are able to conceal from the user — and that at great expense in engineering time spent on fighting spam, including by major email servers completely blocking chunks of the IP address space due to them being hives of abuse.
Lemmy starts with email-like assumptions: open federation is the default; user identities are tied to your local instance but are globally addressable (and look like email addresses); it’s expected that any user on any well-behaved instance “should” be able to join any conversation on a community from any other well-behaved instance; defederation is thought of as something done when an instance is causing problems (technical, social, managerial, etc.).
Email went down a particular history. It became business-critical. It became heavily abused. Because it was business-critical, it kept getting more popular even though it was heavily abused. And today email kinda sucks for a lot of users; enough so that even for its original purpose (sending messages to individuals) many people prefer a centralized service like 🤬 Facebook.