Technology

Decentralized Identity could be implemented relatively easily just by allowing users to enter a their public key, like in git or PGP. How to sync the data is a different matter though. Maybe you can enter a username (e.g. @user@instance) in your instance's search field and have it federated to your account there if the cryptographic signature matches?

I think #1 is a great idea, but it would take a lot of work and would probably be a pain to phase-in and phase-out across all platforms, but I do think it's a good idea, at least to offer as an option. While I am loathe to mention anything cryptocurrency and NFT-related, creating a simplified distributed ledger and smart contract system that would propagate through federated communities seems like an interesting idea. Alternatively, creating a way for users to specify their other usernames on other servers in a small bio in a profile page could be a possible compromise.

Your point #2 also sounds great, but I don't think this should be allowed between communities on defederated instances, because there's laws in many countries that can classify the act of hosting/providing certain content to be criminal. Therefore, if say if server_a resides in country_a, and country_a allows piracy, and server_b in country_b, and country_b considers it a criminal act to propagate certain information about piracy, the server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy might have different restrictions to discuss piracy. However, a less-informed mod may attempt to federate server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy, and insodoing accidentally make the owner/host of server_a unknowingly complicit in a criminal act.

I'm not a lawyer, and of course this is not intended to be legal advice, but I think that the effort would better be spent on implementing a solution to the decentralized identity problem, than the de-fragmentation of similar communities.

One other nugget to consider, assuming we were to replace Reddit, and the sum of the users on the fediverse were to achieve similar numbers to Reddit's glory days--we would definitely be scraped for AI training data. By keeping the communities fractured, that makes it far more difficult for a company to easily scrape all the information needed. While it might be trivial right now, in the ideally decentralized structure that the fediverse would take, it would take a lot more requests for a server to chase out every strand on every network.

Perhaps in this sense, it might be wise for instances to allow specific community defederation(ie, where server_a and server_b are federated, but server_a does not allow server_b/piracy to propagate(this may already be possible, IDK)), but I do not think it would be wise to allow community to community federation.

TL;DR: #1 is a great idea, OP, and it could be implemented in a simplified distributed ledger that propagates through federated communities, and uses a simplified smart-contract--or the problem could be solved by a compromise that allows users to specify their usernames for other instances in a small public bio. Addressing #2, this could cause legal problems in specific scenarios, rather it is more important for any instance to be able to disallow the propagation of specific communities from a federated server (if this isn't already possible).

I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate

I don't understand the first one, why would we want that? Wouldn't it be enough to make it possible to move accounts similar to how mastodon does it (but including your local content)?

My bigger problem is that if a instance goes down then the community is gone. I like how Matrix has solved it that you can have aliases and the content gets replicated on other servers, etc. Then even if people defederate then you still have your old copy and people can keep using it.

The idea of federating communities does sound like a good idea. Now that I think of it I'm surprised that isn't already a thing.

I like your points.

Short term they need to work on the "all front page". It doesn't seem to give me popular posts from all instances, it's full of 2 to 3 to 4 day old posts that were never very popular. I have to manually go around (like to this community) to find content.

@DaughterOfMars

For #1 - ive thought about that.

My thought would be something like a small LDAP type server. Self-hostable. You make a user like [email protected] and its honored as a log in for the various fediverse stuff.

So like it could hold the subsciptions for the communities on the various threadiverse servers you connect to localy, and when you open say lemmy.ml, part of the info sent for your user would be a list of communities you are subscibed to on lemmy.ml.

If it just handles the user auth, then it could also be a user auth for other fedivers stuff too. PixelFed, and Mastodon, etc. Each service could have its own sub section of the user object's info.

You would still probably end up with a "home" instance you would use, but if that home instance becomes untenable, or goes away, then you would just pick a new instance and log in there with your [email protected] account.

Im not a good enough dev to code it, but thats my idea anyway.

You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.

If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real "you"?

Friendica, I believe, federates their groups. You can see them from mastodon as a user. I guess in AP vocabulary they are an actor. You can post to the group from mastodon too.