Disclaimer: I’m no IT expert/man. I’m just wondering what structure these instances should be.
Because as a new user:
- Communites catalog is messy: Redundant communities, Difficult to search for communities and tags and posts, No verifying way if a community does exist or not.
- I have still no idea to the idea (just one account could travel in any instances/servers). But I have a Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin account [EDIT] and now Squabbles account [/EDIT].
- What if all other creators/mods establish communities/instances/forums in a same majority website (so might become Reddit Copycat eventually funnily, the essence of “Fediverse” left the chat—seems doesn’t work at all).
So I ended up wondering ideas, just sharing, might help. May call me stupid of these already in advance, of course I have 0 IT knowledge.
BTW, why is the image of my post “stored” in archive.org anyway? Could I see the image in archive.org? (cause I know archive.org where I borrow tons of books.)
Redundancy (multiple instances making communities on the same subject) is a thing that’ll happen. I’m already subbed to communities on several instances dedicated to the same subjects. That can have an advantage, though, in that communities on the same subject but different instances can provide different perspectives on the subject depending on the makeup of the community in each instance (membership, modding, etc). Don’t like the community in one instance? Unsub from that one and hop on over to another one. Having one account able to access multiple instances allows for that. It can also help if one community or instance goes down for whatever reason, there may be another community/instance open where you can keep interacting. So I don’t see the redundancy thing as necessarily a problem.
I also started to think about the concept where communities would not be local to the instance and they would work more like domains… kind of like BBS groups did. Individual instances would then just host subgroup of these.
But I think I found problem with that idea after reading your comment. Due to different moderation policies these wouldn’t be (and shouldn’t be) having the same content and contributors so they might as well be separate as they are.
I have no idea what your photo is trying to illustrate.
But you are right that it’s a messy setup. I have an account on lemmy.world instance, and it is possible to find communities on other instances while logged in here, but it’s not very easy. And it’s possible for two communities with the same purpose & name to be on different instances. Should I join <topic>@lemmy.world, or should I join <topic>@beehaw.org ? What info is available for someone to make a distinction? It’s early days here so maybe something will happen to make things clearer, but the nature of being federated & decentralized means there will always be some kind of problem with this.
