2y ago

Does it seem like we’re mixing two concepts, having servers for users and content?

It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.

It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.

It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.

Thoughts?

51 comments

There’s many ways these communities could end up gathering over time given the features of the platform we have. The most likely in my opinion is that certain communities on certain instances will take off and gradually people will focus on those instead of the many duplicates on other instances. It’ll probably be quite a while before enough critical mass builds up.
- Exactly what I think as well. Reddit had multiple subs for the same toppic, but only one of them really takes off, and the others just fizzle out or have a slightly more specific focus. Same will happen with the Fediverse.
  
  Agreed. And it's interesting to see how communities are spread out even among related topics. For example if you see my post here with a list of crafting / maker communities, generally the first one or two under each heading are the most active and they're all over the place.
  .world and .ml and kbin.social yes, but also .ca, blahaj, sopuli, and various others. And that's just the quickly-establishing communities within one niche!
- Users won't know what the biggest instances are though if they can't see the true user counts. People have to go to lemmyverse.net for that right now, which is very anti-ux. This needs to be integrated into lemmy itself
  
  Honestly, good. People shouldn't be picking based on quantity, but quality.
- This would generally suck and result in centralization, especially bad if any of the big communities end up in the hands of people like the lemmy.ml devs.
  
  well, the good thing is, is that it's way easier to just migrate to a different community than to a completely different platform like what happened with reddit.

This is how email works. This is how the internet worked in general before the big sites
The problem you want to fix is a big issue in computing in general. Billions have been spent on last mile auth and universal digital identity is still just a bit out of reach
Soon.
- I mean, absolutely - I guess what I'm saying is, it feels like a good time to bake in good ideas, while the fediverse is still evolving. After a while it'll just be the way it's always been and it'll be harder to improve.
  
  Digital identity at scale is still in the research stages and requires a fair amount of capital. This is why Google and social logins are dominant.
  Unless someone has a rabbit in thier pocket we are waiting for a decentralized form of auth. There are some but people don't really like them. Even here.
  The w3c standard you want to look into is DiD
  Source: day job
- Why tho? If we can get standardized protocols and stuff, why not a standardized login system where 1 account works on every site?
  
  Reposting from below:
  Digital identity at scale is still in the research stages and requires a fair amount of capital. This is why Google and social logins are dominant.
  Unless someone has a rabbit in thier pocket we are waiting for a decentralized form of auth. There are some but people don’t really like them. Even here.
  The w3c standard you want to look into is DiD
  Source: day job
- Agreed, although before 366 hosting it was an exchange shitshow.

Yes, absolutely. This not only limits fragmentation due to defederation, but would really help scaling as well. Having user servers lets those servers focus on being essentially caching servers, while limiting load on any community server.
- I don't want to host an instance but I think I could be compelled to host a caching server if such a thing existed.

I'm sorry if I'm being pedantic, but so many of these discussions come down to "how can we make Lemmy be Reddit," or "how can we make a federated network not be so federated."
- This conversation is the exact opposite of that. This is “how can we better optimize federation”.
  
  It kinda is though, maybe not so much "be like reddit" but it's definitely "change how federation works". Separating accounts and communities would make the concept of instance even less tangible and it'd change them from a place where you "live" to just a collection of communities with no real attachment to you.
  If the design behind fediverse is a bunch of instances that self-govern and manage their own users but can communicate with other instances that they want to, then removing the "users belong to that instance" is a huge change at the very core of a fediverse. It has nothing to do with "optimization".
- I see it more of federation copying the structure and posting habits, despite repeating its mistakes while also making said mistakes worse.
  What I'd like to see is global posting for some things (and those things using tags, topics, events/timelines etc) such as news and some types of videos. You'd still be discussing it on your instance (further unification could be done, or maybe just quick-switching what instance comment section you're looking at/posting on) only now most of the time it'd be on a topic/event itself or on specific coverage of it.
  If someone wants to post it to a community, they can make a thread with their own take (hopefully something substantial, but it'd depend on the community) for people to comment on instead. Thus better grouping and filtering.
  Any text post, original content, or less general/common content would function the same. And perhaps posting links could even work the same posting-wise, just auto-generating a global link thread for people to discuss if they don't want to comment on the community post that originated it (which hopefully means articles have something to discuss or at least are a very good fit for the community that they're in).
  
  I mod a sub that is niche and there are 3 other subs by the same name. We all agreed to put a sticky post on 2 of the 3 directing people to the main.
  It's no different than reddit, !beekeeping@lemmy.world, !beekeeping@lemmy.ml, !beekeeping@iforget.lemmy is no different than /r/beekeeping /r/bees /r/beekeeping
  Right now we are creating communities with the same name as reddit subs to aid in transitioning. That won't last forever, and as long as people use good community descriptions people will find the good ones.
- I think also one of the concerns is - well, one of my fav subs used to be bonsai. If each server has it's own bonsai sub it'll be three users and never hit critical mass, so no bonsai discussion. There will be heaps of discussion in a small handful of the most mainstream subs on each server, but smaller communities may never really take off. I think it's those niche interests that really help adoption, and I'd like to see Lemmy take off because I love finding those communities.
  There are a number of geographic servers that are already the obvious choice for discussion around living in a particular place, I just wonder if we can find a way to create a logical home for some of the other more niche interests so they can grow as well - I mean, we already have a bunch of tech based ones (like all the programming discussion on programming.dev), but I'm worried that it will never take off for things that aren't tech based, and I think those other communities make a platform useful.
  Fragmentation has advantages, sometimes the same topics duplicated across servers means you can find a better community, but it means only topics with really broad appeal (which are probably going to be the same topics between a lot of servers) are going to have active users. So we'll end up with a really bland selection of the same discussions and no niche interest communities, leading to a lack of diversity and uninteresting content.

Currently there are (is?) content-only servers like https://lemmit.online/ .
I have been thinking perhaps the idea can be carried further and we can separate the user-facing front end and the back end.
Imagine having multiple front end servers (e.g. fe1.site, fe2.site, ... fe5.site) all connecting to the same user database and the same back end server which serves the communities and contents etc (call it be.site for example). A user signs up once and can login to any front end server with the same account, create a community /c/whatever on e.g. fe3 and it will be accessible automatically on fe1-fe5.
This is in addition to the back end federating with outside servers. Outside sees the community as be.site/c/whatever and users there as be.site/u/whoever. (or maybe make an alias like www.site/c/whatever www.site/u/whoever).
Additional front end servers can be added to spread the load if there are many users. If done right the users shouldn't even need to choose (or be aware of) which front end server they log on to, it can be automatically load-balanced. Another idea would be that special front end servers can be created to only serve API calls for apps.
I'm not sure if this will have bottleneck somewhere else, but I think this is an interesting idea to explore.
- interesting - sounds like this would be a more in depth solution, but the ideas are really good.
- I really love this idea

51 comments