Like I said - there is a small vocal group who few that Lemmy as a whole should be boycotted due to the developers’ political views.

Why would a Kbin user want to speak to you, a Lemmy user?

Some people are excessively sensitive to software developer political views.

Lemmy isn’t Kbin and Kbin isn’t Lemmy. Both are software participants in the fediverse. It is like saying nginx isn’t Apache: of course isn’t, but that doesn’t make them any less web servers.

While I agree there should be functionality to propagate changes to a community between instances when the host is offline, there is no practical way to share administrative control of a community. Any decision by an administrator to sanction a community or defederate an instance will just result in exactly the fragmentation you fear.

The real solution is for small groups of communities with similar interests to gather on separate instances with few or no users. Meanwhile, other instances gather users with few or no local communities. This maximizes the benefits of cacheing community content while minimizing the impact of defederation. If a community host can no longer be maintained by its owner, that ownership can be easily transferred without transferring the burden of hosting hundreds of communities or supporting user logins.

If the mods can agree on policy, there is absolutely no reason to have two communities. Shut one down and use the other.

Edit: can someone explain to me what the difference between synchronizing two communities and subscribing to a federated community is? I mean, that’s exactly the point of federation.

No, and the difference between Beehw and Lemmy.world is why. Different people have different views about moderation and what is acceptable content.

There are two solutions to the real problem of duplicate content:

1. Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
2. Making crossposting a reference to the original post, not a copy. Mods would need to be able to block crossposts from specific communities, and remove crossposts to their sub.

Bots that don’t identify as such count towards active users. There have been a number of bot purges.

Pro-tip: if you are trying to figure out if a website has a feature, try the default web interface first.

Federation is the future of social media for exactly this reason, especially in the twitter-like realm where who is saying it is as (or more) important than what is being said. These people and organizations need to control their brand outside the scope of commercial pressure from the platform.

Not in All. The traffic in all is proportional to the number of subscribed communities of an instance, which is roughly proportional to the number of users.

Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.

Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.

Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.

That’s pretty much my thinking, though there is an advantage that having a large number of users on an instance amplifies it’s caching effect, though as you say - if their interests are too far spread, that effect is diminished.

Not harmful, but I would agree that the network seems optimized for a small number of user-focused servers, and a large number of community-focused servers.

No, because the model for ActivityPub is very different than how OAuth is used for authentication. What you describe is like wanting to log in to hotmail using your gmail account, and being able to send and receive e-mail from your gmail address.

It is a fundamental to ActivityPub that a user exists at a domain, and content coming from or going to that domain is sent from / to the relevant server at that domain.

Federated login is a good idea, and it’s been done, both in closed and open forms. Combining federated login and federated ID over ActivityPub would fundamentally change ActivityPub.

I’m just going to say… “All” isn’t your feed. It is everything people on your instance have subscribed to. So, what you are saying is that the other people on the instance are subscribed to too much NSFW content. I’m not sure that individuals should get to police that.

“Subscribed” is your feed. Include or exclude whatever content you wish. You can blur NSFW if you want to browse all without seeing anything you don’t like.

Interesting - TIL. I wonder how Lemmy resolves the post #, since it is different between instances, and if it re-syncs comments when you do that. The post # thing is annoying, btw, because it makes it impossible to use relative links in posts/comments.

A better analogy is how Lemmy and Mastodon are theoretically compatible. Yeah, you can get federated content, but it really isn’t usable.

Kbin is just a different implementation of Lemmy, intended to be compatible (not coincidentally compatible through the protocol).

Kind of. My observed behavior of Lemmy, combined with comments from some developers (I haven’t read the code):

Post goes up on community hosted on instance A, Message goes out to B and C: “here’s a new post”

User x@B comments on post. Message goes from B to A saying “here’s a new comment”. A adds the comment, then sends a message to C “here’s a new comment”

User y@C upvotes the comment. Message goes from C to A, then A sends a message to C.

Each of those messages are confirmed by the recipient, and there are timed retries. However, there have been plenty of cases where one of those messages get lost, and the communities get out of sync. As I understand it, the message traffic is only changes. They don’t talk to each other to see what the current state of the content is. So whenever a sync break happens, it is permanent. New content/changes are fine, but stuff that gets lost in transit is lost for good.

I’m not sure ActivityPub is suitable for implementation of Lemmy/Kbin. ActivityPub seems to be a push (with retry) protocol, where if a message gets lost, the protocol doesn’t seem to have a means to recover synchronization. Theoretically, instances could verify synchronization on a periodic basis, but that would be a massive increase in traffic.

Lemmy isn’t really targeting that space, though Reddit had a feature that they could add here that would work hit some of your feature points: there was a user page that was like a sub owned by each user. In the meantime you could create a community and make it mod only posts, and that would be pretty much the same thing. Just no hashtags.

Mastodon does (by default) have a post length limit of 500 characters, but in all other ways it sounds like a better fit for what you want.