Update: I learned a thing

Get the Kbin Link extension for Firefox or Chrome. It works for Lemmy too, despite the name

This is probably the biggest issue I have with Lemmy right now. To make matters worse, it’s really easy to miss how the system works. A lot of new users on smaller instances probably think this place is a ghost town because they don’t see many communities in the directory. It’s not ideal to have to use an external tool to find communities, then extra problematic that the actual process is so awkward: manually pasting the address from the external site in the search bar, then you get a “community not found” warning but ignore that, then the community will appear but it’ll grab the old posts and not the comments. Weird.

I can accept that it would be too much if every single instance defaulted to a full local sync of every other community on every other instance, but they should at least show up in a list when searched for, IMO.

Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’.

I know what you mean, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Look at the recent beehaw-defederation drama. This would have been totally intransparent if the whole federation thing would be something that’s only running behind the curtains.

I mean, you dont have to do it personally. Just someone from your server has to tell the local server “hey, im interested. Please give this server a feed” and then everyone on that server now gets a feed. You can also use the community search and just select all and then it will search out and then you can subscribe from that page. It’s basically a master list of communities. For instance https://lemmy.world/search/q/pokemon/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 then everyone on lemmy.world now has to deal with an influx of pokemons…

I might be misunderstanding but it basically works the way you want it to work but in a different way than you want it to work.

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 think for a platform like this, in any case, a little bit of extra user education goes a long way. We shouldn’t be too afraid of expecting end users to educate themselves a bit, and we shouldn’t be too eager to hold their hands every step of the way. It makes for more adept end users and a healthier overall community, in my opinion. It’s like encouraging movie lovers to get off the couch and exercise once in a while.

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service)

Wouldn’t this cause similar issues to blockchains, where new users need to download a huge blockchain file? New instances would need to download an enormous list of every single community on every single server. Wouldn’t that eventually cause issues?

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index?

Sure, this and anything else is possible as long as people have the motivation and knowledge to pursue and implement it.

Something similar to DNS standards could work for Fediverse sites. In fact, why not piggyback on DNS like the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and even openpgp4fpr / KeyOxide standards. DNS itself fulfills the first two requirements:

1. Some form of “master index” - check! ✅
2. Replicated across “instances” - check! ✅ … in a sense …

• If you consider: Zone Transfer / AXFR a form of “replication”
• If you consider DNS servers a “node” / “instance”… rather than just a Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse “instance”

For the second point about DNS zone transfer… it used to be the case that anyone could issue the AXFR request to a DNS server. However, this basically dumps all the records on a DNS server’s zonefile for that domain. So, it’s often disallowed nowadays because it discloses all hosts in the zone file, some of which might be considered private by the domain owner. Instead, server admins usually configure this to only be allowed by trusted IP addresses of other hosts. (I guess it’s a very crude form of “web of trust” based on IP allow lists and the whims of a SysAdmin.)

Maybe the Fediverse has use for piggybacking on DNS via TXT records for some use cases. However, it’s likely that some other decentralized method of replication might be invented specifically for federation with other ActivityPub servers.

If you want that functionality use new. Hot and active are for posts that are popular not for flooding the top of my screen with random posts.

They’re removing it because it puts a lot of load on the servers but I’m not sure how much of it will be removed

This is a question that would need to be directed towards the devs ;) I’m not sure about that, but in its current state it’s causing more trouble

Sorry if my wording was not clear, but that’s just a wish of mine, not some planned feature!

A feed aggregator or multireddit style feature would be excellent. So I could create a “technology” feed and see the beehaw technology community, the lemmy.world technology community, the kbin technology community, etc.

Actually merging those communities across different instances, as some have asked for, would be a horrible idea and bypassing the entire point of federation.

Just want to clarify.

I’m staying. I like what I see now and I am so excited for the upcoming changes. The only way for lemmy/kbin is up!

Atm i like lemmy more , it feels more free and fresh , doesnt feel like i need to expect a removal / censoring from a mod or a filter at every post or comment like on reddit.

I think you’re wrong. I think Lemmy is already at the point at which it will survive and thrive, simply because there are enough people here already who prefer it.

Yes, there are undoubtedly people who are so unsatisfied here that they’ll end up going back to Reddit. Bluntly, I say good riddance to them. Lemmy doesn’t need them and IMO shouldn’t want them.

should be fairly easy: send invite to same community on other instance, after merge instances will sync community, moderators will merge.

But this might bring other problems

You subscribe to a instance of a community.

Then within that community interface should be a list of all external instances of the same name,
that you can just click all the check boxes to sub to those too,

You now have a feed of that instance name that pulls from all of the instances,

and you can opt out of individual instances being in your feed, of ones where moderation is particularly bad for that particular instance.

I think multi reddits (which are a highly requested feature now) could be used as a decent compromise.

Basically imagine users can group communities together into one mini-feed. This could be used for similar communities across multiple instances, like [email protected] and [email protected]. Call them multi-lemmies or subscription groups or web rings or whatever.

Then, what if moderators could cooperate create their own recommended feeds that users can subscribe to? Maybe even put a link to it next to the “Subscribe” link in the sidebar. If users of both communities are encouraged to sign up for the multi-lemmy, then everybody can see everybody else’s content in one combined feed without having to cross-post.

Posts are still hosted on their home instance, so there’s no extra work for moderators except over agreeing which other communities can join the ring. If a user doesn’t want to see a particular community for whatever reason, they can still subscribe/unsubscribe to specific communities like before. That way we get the best of both federation and similar communities sharing content.