Transitioning /r/rust to the Threadiverse

Avoiding showing identical posts to a user separately seems like a very easy problem to solve.

I disagree. Grouping communities makes sense if they need the same admin policy. Admin policy sets a floor on what mods are required to police when it comes to things like hate speech and threats, but mods in a programming community aren't going to allow that shit anyway, so admin policy is irrelevant.

I would also take a look at Matrix. Its rooms are decentralized (although other parts like users are not). It would be an interesting backing protocol for something like Lemmy. You could probably use a model where a community is a room, then posts are references to rooms posted into that room. Comments on posts then occur in the post room.

how does moderation work?

I think it works the same. As part of the community configuration you have a list of mods. Those mods can then post messages such as "ban this user" or "remove this post". If these messages are sent by a mod then they are applied by those in the community.

With lemmy, you can always go to the instance admin if your mods suck, but if it’s completely decentralized, you need some other mechanism.

I think removing the instance admin is actually a feature. IMHO the community is the mods to some degree. If the mods suck then you can either ask them nicely to transition to a new set of mods or you just start a new community. Basically I don't think it is valuable to add a power above mods, because then what if the instance admins suck? I think part of moving communities away from instances would be removing the power of instance admins. They can still ban communities from their instance, but they have no power over the community itself.

if a community starts sucking, [...] you can just go to another major instance and find a similar community, but if it’s decentralized, [...] you’ll essentially have to get a large chunk of the community to move...

I think this is a feature. It is basically democracy for communities. If the community is great then it will gather lots of people and be popular. If it starts sucking then people will leave and find alternatives. It is basically democracy. If there is one "Rust" community with fantastic mods that everyone loves then I don't see it as an issue that there aren't alternatives. But if they start upsetting some subset of the communities you will see alternative communities form and if the majority of people prefer the alternative then it will supplant the "main" community as the new biggest one.

Mod actions could be cryptographically signed using a private keys, and the public keys of the mods would be part of each community's metadata, updated in a way that establishes a chain of custody so only existing mods can add new mods. Each instance would independently verify that mod actions come from a legitimate mod. (I think I basically just described an implementation of NTFs representing mod privileges, BTW.)

Discourse (where I no longer work, so I shouldn’t really have that staff title any longer)

I understood the title as staff for rust on a discourse instance. It seems like I misinterpreted the rank, and it actually might mean that you were a developer for the Discourse forum software.

We just have to give them a good enough reason to do so, by achieving a modicum of unification through this group-follow proposal.

I didn't really read the blog post very closely before commenting. It looks like the concern is more focused on how to create a global name system for communities that users understand. I don't agree that it's an issue for rust, but I do think it's an issue for the fediverse in general. I'll cover both quickly.

• I don't think it's an issue for rust

I think programmers likely understand the fediverse really well once they've used it. I am doubtful there are actually problems with programmers finding their communties, and successfully subscribing to them. I think Discord servers are more comparable to communities than subreddits to communities. On Discord, if a server doesn't have a vanity address, it's partially not a problem because users are actively searching out official services. For programmers, if the organization backing rust officially designates an instance, I think programmers will understand it.

In my other comment on LemmyRS, I actually saw the disorganization of the fediverse as a feature, not an issue.

• I do think this is an issue for normal users or services

I don't think users understand it at all. I think it's mostly hopeless to try to explain that this other website that seems similar to their home instance can be followed by returning to their home instance or installing this plugin that will link it for them. I think solving it as a client problem is likely a better approach. It seems like users surprisingly do comprehend how to send and receive emails, but I think there are still user interface problems that need to be solved for the fediverse.

I think trying to solve it at the federation level is likely a bad idea. In my opinion, it just seems like other federated services, like IRC and email, and even IP systems (IPV4 vs IPV6) have been very resilient to change. Though, I do think it's possible to have changes merged into Lemmy.

• I view the name system as a feature for rust

There are multiple reasons, here are some

• Users on other instances can have their name associated with their organization, ex. president@whitehouse.gov
• It provides organizations the ability to promote other related communities. I really like that programming.dev controls the local communities on programming.dev, as I'm able to find a bunch of related content all at once instead of having to search it out.
• It prevents reddit-like problems from happening. No one can censor rust's organization from their own instance, they just can remove it from their competing instance. Defederation isn't really a risk because many instances will stay in federation.
• rust as an organization is able to moderate and group their communities better.
• I think it provides more diversity to how clients will change overtime. As an example, on an instance hosted by the rust organization, there could be really good rust language support, because the organization the develops rust cares about the language features on the forum

(Mastodon created the above clip)

Okay, maybe "undiscoverable" is kind of the wrong word. I'm thinking about users who don't really understand how lemmy work and don't know that these tools are available.

During the initial "gold rush", I noticed a lot of duplicate communities being created on lemmy.world that already existed elsewhere (e.g. !opossums@lemmy.world for !possums@possumpat.io ). These communities I guess just didn't appear during a search on lemmy.world (since it didn't know about it).

Honestly, it felt like if you made a community anywhere other than lemmy.world, a lemmy.world version would appear and outcompete it unless you linked it elsewhere or it had a dedicated instance.

Not saying that anyone did anything wrong, it's just people being unfamiliar with the platform.

In short, running an instance requires quite a bit of work, so having a really small instance might be quiet a challenge. Programming.dev is still niche, but large enough to not be a one man show.

Very good points tbh. My main thought with why I suggested lemmyrs.org is cause it would be an entire instance around Rust, not just a single community on an instance. That being said, there is already an official discourse for Rust so maybe just having a single community on lemmy as opposed to an entire instance is enough in that case ^^