Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger
Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:
In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.
They’re different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you’re not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
If it isn’t, OP should add it to the issues tracker! Adding things there gives the project leads, plus anyone who is willing to volunteer some time, to know what features people are asking for, and to choose some ready made things right off of the shelf to work on.
The devs have always been pretty helpful and responsive on Lemmy. I imagine that has changed a lot in the last few weeks, but they’re basically always checking the issues tracker.
This also just is the time defederation happens most. When populations grow faster than people can manage.
Taking on the responsibility of hosting a community website means doing what you think is best for they community. For a place with clear rules and established norms, that means upholding those rules. And if you can’t uphold them against the sheer number of people flooding in, then it means reducing the number of people.
No one website is responsible to the network. This is not a power trip. Though this is about people protecting their “precious communities”, as you so judgementally put it. Because they set up their site to create a coherent community.
If you way to be a part of it, you can apply to join. If you don’t, then you’re not entitled to interact with them.
the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account
I can’t stress highly enough how much this isn’t how it works.
You basically never directly interact with other servers. Instead, when someone on your host site first subscribes to a community hosted on a other site, your instance pulls in some recent posts from that remote site and then requests that all future content from that group be forwarded along to it. Then, people on your local site interact with that mirrored content, and your local site sends local additions back to the original host for syncing.
Your account only exists locally. You’re always reading locally, and you’re always acting locally. Everything else is servers mirroring and forwarding content.
This is Elon Musk erasure.