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.
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.