I love the Fediverse – don’t get me wrong–, but the fact that Lemmy was built atop a profile-oriented streaming stack, and that server moderators get to decide what servers your personal identity gets to interact with, doesn’t sit right with me.
On a whim, a moderator could decide to defederate with one of your favorite servers for no reason at all.
I’m envisioning a server that authenticates you to other servers, accepts notifications to your personal inbox, and hosts its own forums.
One that can whitelist acceptable authentication servers, but doesn’t restrict the notifications to your inbox. And doesn’t restrict you from signing in elsewhere.
Why not, just host your own lemmy instance? Then you’d only get defederated if you got banned basically. or if you are looking for one for you and your friends. then you can just federate with the groups you want to federate with
If I remember hearing it correctly, some lemmy instance admins defederate by proxy. Meaning: they go look at your instance, see who you federate with (even if you do it passively by not blacklisting) and then defederate you if you federate with any instances they don’t like.
(And tbh, I’d do the same, but it doesn’t seem like OP would like that)
If the Lemmy instance isn’t public anyway, then it seems like its federation list doesn’t have to be public either, so other instance admins would have no way of knowing what such an instance federates with.
Can you leave comments from your non public isntance on communities from other instances ?
Yes. I have seen comments before from obscure instances that didn’t seem to be open to the public. It wouldn’t really make much technical sense to prevent that.
ok, clearly I don’t understand the federation protocol then, because I thought if you can see/interact with the instance (like in the @ after the username), you can find out who they federate with.
I don’t know if that’s true if they don’t publish a list of that. I certainly wouldn’t know how.
I think you should be able to decide which forums and cross-domains users you host and federate with on your own server, but not which cross-domains and forums your users interact with on other servers.
Because I shouldn’t have to be at the mercy of other moderators to communicate with people.
If I have an identity, I should be able to use it however I like.
So don’t let people create communities, right?
Then your whole instance would be controlled by you and your whole forum would be yours
The server moderator creates the community, or gives users permission to create communities on their server. I have no problem with that model.
Hosting servers basically have 4 functions:
Let’s say you’re running server at example.com, and I sign up. My username is bob. So, I’m bob@example.com.
Example.com has several local forums, but they lack a significant tech community. So, I go to example2.com, which has a large tech community. Using my login from example.com (and postMessages), I login to example2.com, as bob@example.com. Example2.com has example.com whitelisted as a valid authenticator. So, it will accept their users.
Let’s then say that Bob gets a reply at example2.com. Example2.com pushes a notification to example.com, where Bob can read it.
If you’re hosting it yourself, you wouldn’t be at the mercy of anyone else. You would get full control over your communication experience, along with any consequences that come along with that.
And, if a moderator of another instance defederates me?
If the other party doesn’t want to communicate with you, then what are you trying to achieve?
I think I’m missing something from your premise. Who are you trying to connect to in this case?
Lemmy works by your posts propagating to other servers.
If you’re on server A, and I’m on server B, server B’s moderator can block all of server A. They can make it where I never see your content.
I think the confusing part is, you are talking about starting a cross domain system. Which means, 2 or more people will need to set up and install their own versions (or you are planning to install it on multiple of your own domains), but the same can be accomplished just by, instead of asking people to install something new, form a group that guarantees to keep eachother federated, and have everyone you want make their communities and users on the unified cluster". Yes other instances might defederate you from them per their rules. But how is that different than no one outside your group even making an instance to begin with of “new open BB” to start with.
Because of the social expectation that Lemmy sets. The social expectation is that moderators have the option of defederating anyone on their users’ behalves. They shouldn’t have that right.
I understand that moderators exist across multiple jurisdictions, and their servers fall under multiple laws. So, while a moderator would be able to control his own server’s content under my system, his users would be able to login to other servers which he lacked control of. Granting mods control over local content, but not user interaction with the network.
Balancing expectation between user freedom and server ownership – the mod also being able to whitelist servers he’ll accept other users from.
I think in order for this to work, you would need to make it so that the server admins cannot see the contents of the communication. It wouldn’t work with public content
At that point, you might be better off using something like Matrix or a similar encrypted chat option.