It depends a lot on the source of the pain. It didn’t help mine.

Canonical has completely torched my original opinion of them. I started with Red Had Linux back in the late 90s, but it wasn’t until I could get a better-than-dialup Internet connection in the mid 2000s that I was able to finally dump Windows.

At that point, I was hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu, so I gave it a go. Like most Linux users, I’ve distro hopped. I kept coming back to Ubuntu though. It was just so nice to have a polished Debian available out of the box.

Once they moved the default UI to Unity, I became less enchanted and would use the alternative releases instead. But then came the Amazon ads. And then Snaps and other not-so-hot choices. And now shit like this.

And IBM has destroyed Red Hat now too. Sigh.

MBAs and VCs

A situation that I could see evolving over time is Lemmy/Kbin instances that are focused on a single or small number of subjects instead of being reddit-like and having a space for everything under the sun.

I can imagine that administration of such an instance would be easier in some ways because of the more narrow focus of the site. For example a 3D printing focused instance could have it’s own sections for news, memes, reviews, etc. In such an instance a politics section could be focused on only politics dealing with 3D printing. All other political submissions get purged. Nice and tidy, and with clear rules that are easy to follow and understand site wide. Nobody cries about “censorship” because you don’t have warring camps antagonizing each other in the first place.

Instances like that could also choose to only federate with related instances with similar focuses knowing that many of the problems that come along with massive discussion forums are at least abated.

You’re all doing a great job! Please take care of yourselves too!

Sexual compatibility. Chromebooks are known prudes

That probably is the best solution because it keeps the moderation burden off of the individual sites.

In practice this would be difficult to implement because each instance has its own take on how to shape the code for their site. There’s no obligation to create an instance so that it will be compatible with everyone else’s instance, and in fact I would guess that would be effectively impossible.

Let’s say Instance A allows porn, and a user on A wants to create an account on Instance B, but Instance B doesn’t want any porn on their server. At minimum, a way to keep any porn on that user’s account from syncing to B’s server would have to be implemented.

This is only a single case. There will be plenty more small issues like that to have to work around, so it will take a lot of time to get all that logic designed, implemented and tested.

The cloning of an account might also involve a not-insignificant amount of data being transferred. What if the receiving server wants to limit the amount of data storage for a new account so that they’re not burdened with storing tons of data for new, unknown users? How do you then determine what subset of that user’s data to import?

Maybe these things will happen with enough time, but for now I think it’s best for now at least if everyone thinks of each instance as its own separate website that can communicate with other similar sites rather than a set of cloned sites where which one you pick doesn’t matter.

Please don’t take this as argumentative, as we need people to share ideas like yours! I just keep seeing messages that give me the impression that people have expectations for the Threadiverse that aren’t currently realistic given what the state of the software is now.