this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Fediverse memes
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Memes about the Fediverse.
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Regarding the fediverse at large...
I believe that this is a design issue. Instances are designed so that they function like categories. That categories then have subcategories.
The issue is that with user distribution, you can't then just assign users round robin distribute the load. This leads to what we now have which is very confusing to the end user.
Users was a centralized experience. The duplication of communities is a prime example of the bad design.
In the abstract, I would consider putting all instances in a pool. Each instance runs a different community, with servers also duplicating x number of communities for the sake of redundancy (instance goes offline, content still exists on another server). It's complicated, and has it's own issues/flaws, but I believe that from a high level view, it is a better design in general.
The current system is just a mess unfortunately.
Perhaps there could be a hybrid of these two approaches that would be superior.
My back of the napkin design prioritizes user experience and ease of use. That said, I can immediately think of a few downsides.
Right now the user's identity and the content they consume & interact with are too intertwined in many cases.
There are two aspects here:
We have to get out of the mindset that the server you sign up on is your community, because with federation, you are not limited to the server you sign up on.
How are policies/moderation decisions discussed between the instances? That's why you have different versions of the same instance, because [email protected] and [email protected] are going to be quite different
No more instance based communities. Instead instances are assigned to groups of servers for redundancy and you end up with a more centralized experience.
Essentially you end up with a server cluster.