I’ve introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they’re not into tech this is their first web forum.
I’ve explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that’s ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.
Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he’s registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.
And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.
This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.
Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.
Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.
A lot of this doesn’t work easily on the activitypub model, because accounts and posts and communities live on their host instances, and every interaction has to be relayed to them and updates have to be retrieved from them.
While you can set up mirrors with arbitrary additional moderation that can be seen from everywhere, you can’t support submission of content from instances blocked by the host instance.
The bluesky model with content addressing can create that experience by allowing the creation of “roaming” communities where posts and comments can be collected by multiple hosts who each can apply their own filtering. Since posts are signed and comment trees use hashes of the parent you can’t manipulate others’ posts undetected.
Bluesky already has 3rd party moderation label services and 3rd party feed generators for its Twitter-like service, and a fork replicating a forum model could have 3rd party forum views and 3rd party moderation applied similarly.