this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2021
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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This platform is exactly what I have been looking for (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been looking for a free Reddit alternative and preferably one that was federated. I'm not really sure how federation works with this though. A lot of similar sites are just personal projects that people made as a hobby that lack a lot of important features or the interface was really ugly.

I haven't seen how to moderate communities though but the Github page says this can be done, which I consider important since I want moderation to be done by communities and users rather then admins. If there's a quarantine feature similar to Reddit that would be useful too so I don't just have to ban communities.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Whats unclear to me is how "cross instance communities" could be implemented in activitypub. Honestly I dont see any way to do it, because every Group lives on a single server.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Couldn't it be done by the application, where at AP level there exist 2 Group objects, one on each instance? One is the leader, the Community that was first created, the other is a follower. The group actors synchronise activity between them, such that in the UI it seems they form a single Community. This means e.g. that the follower group is authorized to perform admin activities on behalf of admins at the leader group (and possibly vice versa).

I know this is something of a trick, less desirable than native protocol support. Note that I am very interested in seeing the Community concept go next-level, see e.g. Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension?. Also there's renewed interest in standardizing Group behavior, now that PixelFed will release support for them. See PixelFed Groups on SocialHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

If there is a leader then its still centralized, and its not clear what will happen if that leader disappears. Sure there might be some hacks to make it work, but I think that decentralized groups would need to use a different protocol from activitypub.

I am also interested in standardizing activitypub groups, but for now i'm busy refactoring our entire federation code, to make future changes easier (including compat with other projects).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Maybe leader/follower is the wrong concept. Synched groups might be better. To the user-observer they are similar to decentralized groups. But it'll be a bit hacky, for sure :D

Good luck with the federation code. I am super curious about the features it will bring to Lemmy!. Thank you for all your efforts and dedication 💚