Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: join-lemmy.org/…/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_f…
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lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 weeks agoI feel like ActivityPub implemented federation in a really weird way, and that’s what causes problems like @linearchaos@lemmy.world is reporting, or the issue that Blaze is addressing through multi-accounting. Perhaps we shouldn’t be sharing content across instances but only credentials.
For example. If you’re registered to instance A, and B federates with A, then B would let you post from your A account as if you were registered to B. Then let the retrieval of the content of different instances up to the front-end, instead of mirroring it.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: join-lemmy.org/…/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_f…
That’s some great news! It’s great to see that the issues are being ironed out.
OpenStars@discuss.online 5 weeks ago
No, the whole point for the federation is to share the content. For one, it allows redundancy so that if a rogue mod or admin decided to delete a bunch of stuff, then every other instance still retains copies of what came from it.
But that said, having to keep everything up to the second, in batches of a single action, is extremely limiting. If I downvote someone with an accidental button press, then undownvote them, then upvote - that could have been just one net interaction to send, but instead it is three.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so you’d see what was removed within the original context. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I’m aware that it’s a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you’re registered to, it’s already addressing the main needs:
OpenStars@discuss.online 5 weeks ago
At a wild guess, it could literally be the communism?
No really, I’m serious: what you are describing sounds to me like there is a sense of “ownership”, as in an instance owns a community, whereupon everything else is lesser than the owner with respect to that particular content - e.g. the others “mirror” the content that is “owned” by the instance that the community is on. A master/slave relationship, in computer science terminology.
In contrast, ActivityPub sounds to me (caveat: I’ve never read the source) like everyone is equal, hence why every action is shared equally by all. A distributed burden. Except without the major traditional benefits of it being distributed - i.e. Aussie.Zone cannot simply connect to some other server instance with less physical distance between it and Lemmy.World, no it must go straight to the source, even when that results in a 7-day delay (and even that cutoff is only because things older than that simply get deleted).
On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.
I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
I’m not sure if the analogy with communism holds well, as communism implies post-scarcity. Perhaps socialism - if you see the current AP protocol as the Soviet economy from 1918 to 22, my proposal is basically a Lenin style New Economic Policy: a step back (less federation) to take two steps forward later (federation growth).
As for the mirrors, secondary (as in backup) would be a good analogy; their main reason to exist would be to make admins+mods accountable. (“Why did you remove [content]? It’s within the rules, even if you disagree with it!”). And ideally it should be possible for a single mirror to work for multiple instances, specially smaller ones. In the meantime, the actual (non-mirror) instances would be on equal grounds.
As far as I know, as someone who didn’t read the source either, that’s accurate. aussie.zone is basically mirroring the content of federated instances, to service its users, then when some aussie.zone user posts something there the other instances mirror it.
In theory, there isn’t. In practice:
If I had to take a guess, the reason why W3C, Lemmer-Webber and Prodromou created the AP the current way is because, while you’re raising a baby, you never know the growing pains that it’ll have as a teen.