There’s a number of ways it could be improved, but I get the impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man’s Reddit and are into that sort of monolithic instance control and quite opposed to the transparency that would required to do it any other way (like having the author of upvotes or downvotes visible or the name or an identifier linkable to the mod who performed a moderator action show up in the mod log any longer). At this rate, all I see it is becoming more monolithic and eventually more drama between instances (which there is already plenty of).
impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man’s Reddit
No, not at all. It’s just that sh*t things happens and instances goes down. Remember that kbin (and now Mbin) is development by software engineers doing their job in the free time. And instance owners also. Most don’t get paid for all this work, and if they do… we are talking about 5 dollar per month.
At the same time devs also have families, full time job and other things. While I heard from the Lemmy dev is able to full time work on Lemmy now.
So where is the development interest for less monolithic instance control then? Everything I read indicates a movement towards it, with less transparency that can be federated (like not allowing downvotes and moderation to truly be transparent and there’s no interest in making communities that aren’t localized to single instances by making its moderation be something that can be something that can be applied and decided at the user or each instance level.
This would also mean inherently allowing user participation in a community regardless of how much an instance doesn’t want it (as long as it is not their home instance, which would be the ones in charge of removing spam/bot/CSAM) if a particular selection of a moderation group does not allow it. Communities are monolithic by design, limited to an instance’s moderation and then to that instance’s administration and then furthermore by its availability.
I’m sure that the availability of time and effort are a factor, it would require dealing with new and different issues, it might require leaving some monolithic aspects, but it fails before it gets at that point, there is no interest nor is it where development wants to head. Communities are monolithic and will essentially remain monolithic. The only thing that is federated is essentially the search features and pseudo-SSO of Lemmy.
What you all mention here are valid issues and concerts. The point is that everything you mentioned is related on how the ActivityPub protocol works, which inherently create this situation of semi-decentralizing in form of instances and federation. If we want to get rid of that, we need a fully different protocol that resolves all your issues in a decentralized way, which isn’t always scaling, or leaking the technical advances to do so. Or you could even argue that ActivityPub is currently de facto standard (which also includes Mastodon, etc).
The only way to solve all the issues mentioned is to fully replace ActvityPub by another protocol. Which doesn’t relay on instances, and no DNS, and no global identity… Which are technically very challenging subjects on its own. Fediverse is well… federated, but not decentralized.
Disclaimer: I’m the developer of Mbin project. And previous contributor of kbin.
