zksmk

The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

"Half" is stretching it. More like a slice: UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Spain and a slice of France.

I think you're getting hung up on the word "federations" (noun) instead of the adjective "federated".

Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?

Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don't seem "legit" enough. And that is where you're onto something with the noun federations.

If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump's Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.

Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.

I honestly can't tell if people that write this type of stuff are delusional or misinformed or both or what's going on. Ah, yes, a "referendum", announced 3 days in advance, done in less than a week, in the middle of a war-zone, with a refugee crisis happening, with invading soldiers on every corner, with no multiple unbiased third party observers. Mariupol had over 400 000 people before this invasion, in January, and now it has less than 100 000. The Catalan referendum took literal years (the Catalonia/Spain situation and what I may or may not think of it being beside the point) to be finished. The only time I can think of this kind of referendum happening was with that guy with a mustache in Austria, but that's not a flattering look, you don't want that comparison.

In the most recent elections in 2019 the "pro-Russian" parties and candidates (the blue ones, and only the dark blue one was decisively pro-Russian, the leader of the light blue party had this to say once the invasion happened) didn't constitute the majority anywhere, especially not in southern Ukraine. And for those who did vote, voting for a party that wants closer ties with Russia and joining CIS ("Russia's EU" ) means you want to be annexed into Russia they same way voting for a pro-EU party and closer ties with the EU means you want to be annexed into Poland. In case it's not clear, it doesn't.

And to top it all of, you'll notice the area that voted in a higher amount for closer ties with Russia and voted for the "pro-peace" parties as they were called, in a more detailed view, through several stages of the election, almost matches the borders of the oblasts, one, two, three, and not any kind of ethnic or declared language or linguistic boundaries. Which means people there are sick of a war ravaging their home, their towns being cut of from the regional center, where their kids might've went to uni before the war, and so on, and most poeple don't care about the whole "we're Russians, we love Russia, we want to be a part of it so bad" kind of thing.

The only regions that might make some sense are Crimea and the former secessionist area, but I guess we'll never know for sure, with how those annexations and invasions were carried out too. And guess what, when Crimea was invaded, the world mostly didn't care, even Ukraine mostly just "sent a stern letter". When the Donbas secessionists did their thing, the world still mostly didn't care. Ukraine, of course had to, it was a mixed area with no clear borders, of course it had to respond. There was no slow build up to a referendum, nothing, just a straight up secession in a mixed area. And even then, the new border seems to have mostly matched the area of ethnic Russians which means, probable local support, and it divided the oblasts in half, roughly accordingly to support, and the border was frozen, for almost a decade.

The main reason this invasion is happening is because Putin and his oligarch and KGB clique are deathly afraid of a more democratic and pro-EU Russian-language-knowing-and-speaking country right next door and what it could do to their power positions. And the US and Russia battling for better power positioning over the backs of Ukraininans. And so they went for a land bridge to Crimea, whether the people there want it or not, with military force, and they went for puting a ball and a chain on the ankle of Ukraine, that's what this is about. Probably mix in a bit of delusional nationalistic grandeur on Putin's part of wanting to have a "legacy", and a bit of paranoia, and what not.

Acting like this 2022 invasion is what the people of Ukraine wanted is ridiculous.

That's fair. Assuming people do behave that way, it wouldn't be an issue.

On a slightly tangential angle: what about the communities that maybe won't have a dedicated instance, like: corgi, cooking, jokes, etc... all those communities and posts would be on the biggest instance(s). If the devs don't want this instance to be the flagship instance, once/if lemmy hits sudden growth they'll be in for a rough time. :P

I just feel like this approach isn't super conductive to decentralization. In the alternative scenario you'd be seeing corgi pics all over the network, this way most likely just here. But maybe that's just an issue of lemmy's current small size, and would be solved on its own once it grew, and the number of instances grew. Maybe I'm underestimating the growth potential of smaller instances.

True, but so would all the other askelectronics communities on all the other random instances too. Good luck finding the best instance and the best community on your own. Maybe, depends.

Also, I might've ninja edit my comment just as you were posting, somewhat relevant to this, so I'll repeat it here: I think this would lead to people just simply asking about the best community all the time. In this case, this stuff might just have to end up being stickied somewhere, in literally all the communities: "If you want a better answer, go to: yaddayadda".

Long comment ahead, sorry about that.

This is the exact worry I've had about lemmy's federation for a long long time, so I've even made an issue on the github awhile ago, with a possible solution. Take a look.

But I don't think it's been high up on the dev's priority list, either due to lack of time and a backlog or they just don't see it as a desired feature, because they might like the idea of a hundred separate similar communities. They might see the future of lemmy's federation in the form of old school forums but with one account login, instead of as a single large community a la reddit. I think that's a mistake. There's a reason reddit replaced forums, and it's not just a single login, it's also single communities.

I almost think mastodon might solve this sooner than lemmy. All they need to do is take the existing feature of "trending posts", and just apply it to individual hashtags too, which can btw already be followed, since the latest update. Boom, they basically already have interconnected "subreddits" at that point. They would just need to add top of the day/week/month, and they've mirrored all the features.

And to be honest, I see merit in both approaches. There is a certain level of humanity, personability and coziness in old school forums that isn't often or easily replicated in large communities generated by the modern social media format. But the other format also has its merits.

Imagine there's an instance dedicated to engineering. It would obviously have the best askelectronics community. And lets say you're a person that's into plants and has an account on an instance dedicated to gardening. And now you want to ask a question to askelectronics. You'd first have to know about the existence, the name and/or the url of the engineers' instance and then go there to get a good answer. That seems like a hassle and unlikely to happen. Mastodon has hundreds of instances.

What would instead happen, is that people would gravitate to a couple, two or three, large instances, that would become huge, most likely split on political grounds. And that's, to be honest, kinda what's already happening with lemmy, no? Maybe two or three additional instances, for, continents or something special, like an instance for official communities of projects. I feel like this future would lead to max 10 large politically echo-chambered instances.

If instead we really would get random topic based instances, things would be very different from reddit. You'd always start your posts with: "So... guys... what's the best instance to ask this question on?"

And if this feature I suggested existed, with the opt in/opt out choice for communities, you could have the best of both worlds, with ease of use included. Actual technical, bandwidth, funding, scaling issues not withstanding, I haven't considered that yet.

Maybe I'm wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm curious what other people think.

Among other things, I love that the EU has a presence on Mastodon: https://respublicae.eu/about and https://social.network.europa.eu/about , and not to mention it's one of the funders of lemmy's development, through https://nlnet.nl/ .

Putting money where the mouth is.

No.

Sciences are a subset of philosophy.

They ask different questions.

So, if I understood this correctly, this would result in some kind of "interactive" or "dynamic" color space, with relationships between colors changing based on the focused distances between them. Vaguely (very vaguely), like this gravitational lensing gif, but with colors changing, instead of shapes. Y'know, like a bulb-y color space. Interesting.

Friendica?

big boyes

solar energy in the enormous surface of these devices

There's already a company making these