Personally I think that if there was like a central link/front end to access everything and then have each user be able to have a recommended list of instances/hosts to access would be a more user friendly solution and a better solution for search engines. I know the fediverse is about decentralization but having a central front end and decentralized back end seems easier for new users. And then for the back ended hosting aspect each host would be able to manually pick which instances or communities to host and mirror. I’d like to hear your ideas since I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Unless you physically own your hardware and connection, all of this is moot anyway.
Any time you’re spinning up an instance on cloud-hosted solutions, you’re by it’s very nature putting everything on someone else’s physical property.
This is an issue I wish was discussed more, because Federation helps ameliorate certain problems with the modern internet, but it doesn’t address how much of the physical hardware and networking infrastructure is privately owned and operated.
Seize the means of computation.
I agree. There is a ton of functionality and UX that can’t be addressed on the backend because of the limitations of the architecture. Those limitations come with some very positive tradeoffs, but the hit to the users could be hidden behind client-based functionality.
Just as an example, it’s okay and part of the design that the same article could be posted to seven different instances. However, we then end up with users seeing the same article seven times, some of which will be having discussions and others which are completely ignored. A client could allow a user to decide to consolidate them all into a single post and read cross-instance integrated discussions. For posts from non-federated instances (for the primary instance for the client), they could mark them the same way they do deleted or removed tags now. You could even communicate to the user that the post came from a non-federated instance and give them the chance to retrieve it.
Basically, users should be allowed to create a news community that consolidates news.whatevers and merges duplicate posts.
I feel like we need different ways to share and learn things about harmful posts and comments. Like, sure maybe your server aggregates the posts, and because you own the server you can remove or edit things if you really want to. But I should be able to say “this is objectively wrong in a dangerous way, and here’s proof” in a side channel that the server owner can’t block.
And for it to have any point at all, clients should be able to subscribe to feeds. Like, a science educator I respect can say “I trust this foundation that fights harmful disinformation” and I should be able to click a button and see their stuff. Without the server owner banning me for some weird reason.
That’s kinda why I figured if the people hosting could choose what instances/subs to host then thats the control they’d have but they wouldn’t be able to remove or edit specific posts since that would be the job of the users/mods.
Well, since you don’t mention boundaries, it could be very different to todays platforms. For example every ‘instance’ is just the frontend/entrance to the same, decentral network that stores the data. Your username would work on every single one of them and it didn’t really matter which one you picked.
We could also do away with the moderators and have it a democratic place. We could either all vote on decisions or delegate our power to other individuals and keep something like moderators/sheriffs but elect them democratically.
