I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
126 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37750 readers
232 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Once "multi-reddits" have been defined and implemented in kbin that shouldn't be an issue. I don't know what'll happen with lemmy, but it would probably be in its interest to implement it too.
This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.
Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.
Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.
If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.
These things have a way to sort themselves out with time so no point in stressing over it.
You're right on that part. Federations works great with mastodon and its instances made of individuals directly interacting with each other's accounts.
But when it comes to interacting though communities already spread through instances, not only it makes it hard for people to follow all these duplicates, but it threatens the very principle of federation in a certain way. Because most people will eventually subscribe to the biggest community for each subject (tech, nature, photo), which often turns out to be hosted on the biggest instances...and that is centralization once again.
A solution could be for users to gather all the communities they subscribed to around topics. Then your feed would be a mix of these topics' groups and singles /c. Twitter does that similarly with its List feature.
Ultimately this is a problem that's never going away until we replace URLs. The HTTP approach to find documents by URL, i.e. server/path, is fundamentally brittle. Doesn't matter how careful you are, doesn't matter how much best practice you follow, that URL is going to be dead in a few years. The problem is made worse by DNS, which in turn makes URLs expensive and expire.
There are approaches like IPFS, which uses content-based addressing (i.e. fancy file hashes), but that's note enough either, as it provide no good way to update a resource.
The best™ solution would be some kind of global blockchain thing that keeps record of what people publish, giving each document a unique id, hash, and some way to update that resource in a non-destructive way (i.e. the version history is preserved). Hosting itself would still need to be done by other parties, but a global log file that lists out all the stuff humans have published would make it much easier and reliable to mirror it.
The end result should be "Internet as globally distributed immutable data structure".
Bit frustrating that this whole problem isn't getting the attention it deserves.
load more comments
(4 replies)