Just in case anyone is using their account here to post to off-instance communities: those posts and comments seem to have a very high failure rate. There is a lot of activity and accounts on this instance. This is to raise awareness, not to pull people away or break up the lemmyverse. Quite the opposite really: there is a technical problem on this instance that might be preventing the lemmyverse from functioning as it should.
It’s probably because of the absolute scale of dot world. This is what happens when you try to centralize ActivityPub, especially an implementation like Lemmy which did not previously have any of the scaling challenges the likes of Mastodon had before.
Everyone should’ve told people to pick different instances (there are STILL new guides written where step 1 is to “just register on dot world” [or shitjustworks, which isn’t any better, really]) and admin should’ve locked registrations after 10-15k, maybe 20k users MAX, yet y’all got too greedy. Good fucking luck dealing with the aftermath.
I should probably go to bed, I’m getting grumpy.
In my opinion, we need to somehow solve the community centralization issue first. MultiCommunities, or some way to aggregate the dozens of large-ish groups like “news, technology, etc” and be able to subscribe to all of them in one fell swoop would allow people to spread out to other instances much more reliably.
I’ve brought this up as a suggestion elsewhere. People seem annoyed at the lemmy vs kbin idea of “communities vs magazines”. Maybe everything is changed to “communities” and “magazines” are officially adopted as community-maintained mega-lists of common communities.
An example. There’s a bunch of car manufacturers. Sure, maybe I could just select the “Honda” community on every instance I can find, or instead I subscribe to the magazine called “Honda” which auto-subscribes me to every single Honda community in the list… or even the magazine called “Cars” which would include all manufacturers and cars communities.
Then there could be a Magazine view for that Magazine which would allow all posts from those communities to be aggregated in one place.
Just spitballing ideas.
That is an issue for sure, but probably better addressed at the ActivityPub level? IMO, an instance should be limited to a single community.
Yes, this would be a change to the underlying protocol. I think it’s definitely worth discussing how this problem can be solved by people who maintain ActivityPub. IMHO the Lemmy and kbin developers should also be a part of these discussions as well.
I don’t think it can be fixed without scaling up the instances, which isn’t for the faint of sysadmin heart, even if you CAN afford the hosting.