I’ve recently tried to use peertube and I think it could improve a lot if it showed all the content in all instances. But instead you have to look around many instances to try and find something you like. Then there’s other thing, it can’t suggest content if it doesn’t know what you like and without sharing the data between the instances it doesn’t know anything about anyone. If the user data was encrypted and shared between all sites, when you log in it could use the now decrypted user data to suggest content. Or maybe it can share the data with third parties, I don’t really know.
Please do, even if it’s a very rough draft kind of an idea, I wanna hear.
I think I would have better insight if I had the experience from running an instance myself. I may do that one day, but right now I don’t have the means. But I still have some thoughts.
I think the best thing would be to make it easier for instance managers to connect with other instances. maybe have tools that would allow this to happen automatically. So if you connect with lemmy.ml, you also connect with all of the instances on their allow list. I don’t know the details of how things currently work well enough to give a clear picture.
Second, hexbear needs to figure out how to merge federation changes. I heard they are working on this, which I am excited to hear. It’s currently the most active lemmy instance, but completely separate from the fediverse.
I also think it would be good to have data of people’s entry point into the fediverse. Do they start at join-lemmy.org? Some other instance list? For join-lemmy.org, I think it would help if lemmy.ml and other big instances were not at the top of the list and instead smaller instances were ranked based on some other metric. (Like invidious has this “health” metric. not sure how it works) There is no shortage of instances as I’ve seen a lot of new ones lately, which is really encouraging. So I think the focus should be making sure these smaller instances offer a good experience to users and people find them and join.
Also very important, Lemmy needs a feature like mastodon to migrate your account to another instance. So people on big instances could migrate to smaller ones.
Personally, I feel like an approach that separates the user identity/account (something like OpenID) from the content server would make more sense for public content and from the client/view/UI/portal used by the end-user to access to the content. Then use standards for any particular server-to-server communication. Much like how blogs can do backtracking between blogs and so.
To me, federation between private servers the way mastodon does it only makes sense for private communication like XMPP or Matrix… but the minute you are publicly posting content in the internet it makes no sense to have servers mirror the content from others just so people can access that content from one server in the next… why not just directly obtain the content from the server it’s from and load it in your client/UI of choice? without having to depend on the server you have an account on hosting it? it creates a dependency between the user and the server that hosts your account and makes it so you might end up having to create multiple accounts in different servers, and at that point it’s not much different from centralized services.