I think the way federation currently works spells doom for the fediverse, should any service of it get major traction. Currently, if you subscribe to a community on Lemmy or follow a user on Mastodon, your instance will pull the content of that instance/user and make it available for all to see and interact with. What seems like a good idea to spread content however is becomming the achilles heel of the fediverse: The admins of Lemmy/Mastodon instances are liable in many juristictions for the content their servers are distributing. This means in practice that many Lemmy/Mastodon instances block NSFW content for example, as the admins, understandably so, are either unwilling or incapable of making sure they are not running afoul of any laws.

As such, I think that the fediverse needs to offer a way for users to follow content from other instances without having that content be stored, let alone shared by their home instances.

A question I have at this point is where this criticism is best levied against. Is it the job of Lemmy/Mastodon to provide such a form of federation, or does the ActivityPub protocol needs to be ammended?

  • Mutelogic@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    There is no perfect solution, though. Both Reddit and Lemmy have inherent flaws and benefits because they serve different purposes.