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?

1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi,

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.

dbilitated,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

interesting - sounds like this would be a more in depth solution, but the ideas are really good.

V4uban,

I really love this idea

cerevant,

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.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer,

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.

cerevant,

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.

Spacebar,
@Spacebar@lemmy.world avatar

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.”

cerevant,

This conversation is the exact opposite of that. This is “how can we better optimize federation”.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

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".

marigo,
@marigo@lemmy.world avatar

I’m new to lemmy so I might be wrong on this, but say if we have one big community for a certain hobby/interest and the moderators get power trippy or there are other problems, people into that hobby essentially have nowhere to go right? Having lots of smaller places and subscribing to them all makes it easier to cut one out and be less reliant on a specific group of people.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

That's true, but by separating communities and accounts you haven't really solved this. It will be solved if/when we get proper migration tools to easily transfer accounts from one instance to another though.

marigo,
@marigo@lemmy.world avatar

Separating the two sounds like it would make the problem a lot worse. Nobody would have a reason to create smaller duplicate communities anymore so things would end up centralised and easier to abuse, like what happened with Reddit. You could hop your account to a new instance, but doing so means nothing if there’s only one instance of the community.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

Oh yeah that's true, I thought you're implying that separating would make it more resistant to power trippy admins so it'd be worth it. I do like the smaller decentralized instances and feeling a sense of "community" when joining each (even though I'm kind of a hypocrite for saying that since kbin.social is relatively speaking pretty big for fediverse) but it does need more work until we get there properly, both in mindsets and in technical support.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer,

Yes, it would be changing how federation works and I would actually oppose a change that says a “user instance” and “content instance” can’t be the same server. It’s a perfectly normal architecture though to have a management, worker, and database service use any combination of 1, 2, or 3 servers. This just seems like a decoupling from a monolith into microservices.

calr0x,

I agree with you.

The future is going to be different than one monolithic website and I think ultimately everyone just needs to relax for 6 months or a year and just get a feel for how all of this settles over time.

Part of the federated future is that we are going to lose content from time to time. Maybe someday someone solves that but this is what a link aggregation ecosystem with no central leadership looks like.

dbilitated,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

yeah I wouldn’t be in favour of making that change to the software itself… I think the features are good the way they are. I’m just thinking in terms of organising services, and the best way to do it - it’s lots of servers run by volunteers and the structure is hazy so I think it’s good to have these conversations.

insomniac_lemon,
@insomniac_lemon@kbin.social avatar

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).

Spacebar,
@Spacebar@lemmy.world avatar

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, !beekeeping, !beekeeping 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.

insomniac_lemon, (edited )
@insomniac_lemon@kbin.social avatar

I mean it is different from reddit in that now instead of 1 server with arbitrarily divided communities, now you have as many as are popular and it is more visible because there isn't enough content. If there are tons of users are all in one place it might make sense for something like /r/bees , but here I think it'd be better served with a tag like #bees for all instances ( ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶u̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶/̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ more serious than I thought, but you'd need to bookmark that tag unless there are other features I'm unaware of). Whereas beekeeping does make more sense as a community.

I could also see it being interesting for unified communities. It would be mostly the same as now in most ways except posts would be visible from all instances (if federation is on and that community is not blocked). Mods would moderate their own instance (and nothing would stop users from posting to a different instance of the community if they so choose) though limited mod sharing could be a thing. So really it's just something to make things less annoying than subbing to 3+ communities (hopefully with link/story merging too as my first comment mentions).

Also with divided communities in mind, why not make posting to multiple communities in one go (tied together thus not cluttering new, and possibly allowing community-specific versions) a thing?

dbilitated,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

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.

Cordoro,

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.

ProfezzorDarke,

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.

OtakuAltair,
@OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net avatar

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

fishos,

Honestly, good. People shouldn't be picking based on quantity, but quality.

OtakuAltair,
@OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net avatar

That quality will be splintered into multiple different communities with the current setup

fishos,

How is that any different than reddit with all the r/X, r/TrueX, r/AltX, r/X2 subs? Whether they're distributed amongst one instance or many, it's functionally the same. Just like we already aggregate content from numerous sources, the fediverse also aggregates the communities too.

I'm subscribed to many communities/magazines in a variety of instances. And many of those I found through word of mouth on here or just by browsing "Hot". They weren't hard to find. I honestly don't see the problem. It's supposed to be splintered so no central authority has control. That's the whole point.

bioemerl,

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.

murphys_lawyer,
@murphys_lawyer@lemmy.world avatar

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.

bioemerl,

The problem is network effects. It's very hard to get mass migration so managers of very large generalized communities can get away with a lot of bullshit when they own the platform uncontested

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