Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances (raphael.lullis.net)

submitted 2 months ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

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[-] anzo@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...

If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)

There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.

I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.

And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that. But it's quite subjective, and hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they're now...

Thanks for the intentions. Let's focus on some new ideas, they'll come...

[-] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 1 month ago

If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.

It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.

centralization of domain names under you.

The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.

Can you name any advantage??

Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.

hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…

As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.

[-] abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us 1 points 1 month ago

I was the only one who could create communities on them.

Typically the only one who can create magazines/communities are local users of the instance. With registration closed, that means only you (or the new instance owner) would be able to do this.

Though one can get around this with some bot magic ( lemmit.online had a magazine that was dedicated to new sub/magazine requests - once someone made the request, the bot would create and own the magazine but add the requestor as the moderator )

Do you intend to have open magazine creation on these instances or would that still be restricted to the owners of the consortium?

[-] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 1 month ago

My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).

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