I think you’re getting hung up on the word “federations” (noun) instead of the adjective “federated”.

Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?

Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don’t seem “legit” enough. And that is where you’re onto something with the noun federations.

If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump’s Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.

Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.

That’s fair. Assuming people do behave that way, it wouldn’t be an issue.

On a slightly tangential angle: what about the communities that maybe won’t have a dedicated instance, like: corgi, cooking, jokes, etc… all those communities and posts would be on the biggest instance(s). If the devs don’t want this instance to be the flagship instance, once/if lemmy hits sudden growth they’ll be in for a rough time. :P

I just feel like this approach isn’t super conductive to decentralization. In the alternative scenario you’d be seeing corgi pics all over the network, this way most likely just here. But maybe that’s just an issue of lemmy’s current small size, and would be solved on its own once it grew, and the number of instances grew. Maybe I’m underestimating the growth potential of smaller instances.

True, but so would all the other askelectronics communities on all the other random instances too. Good luck finding the best instance and the best community on your own. Maybe, depends.

Also, I might’ve ninja edit my comment just as you were posting, somewhat relevant to this, so I’ll repeat it here: I think this would lead to people just simply asking about the best community all the time. In this case, this stuff might just have to end up being stickied somewhere, in literally all the communities: “If you want a better answer, go to: yaddayadda”.

Long comment ahead, sorry about that.

This is the exact worry I’ve had about lemmy’s federation for a long long time, so I’ve even made an issue on the github awhile ago, with a possible solution. Take a look.

But I don’t think it’s been high up on the dev’s priority list, either due to lack of time and a backlog or they just don’t see it as a desired feature, because they might like the idea of a hundred separate similar communities. They might see the future of lemmy’s federation in the form of old school forums but with one account login, instead of as a single large community a la reddit. I think that’s a mistake. There’s a reason reddit replaced forums, and it’s not just a single login, it’s also single communities.

I almost think mastodon might solve this sooner than lemmy. All they need to do is take the existing feature of “trending posts”, and just apply it to individual hashtags too, which can btw already be followed, since the latest update. Boom, they basically already have interconnected “subreddits” at that point. They would just need to add top of the day/week/month, and they’ve mirrored all the features.

And to be honest, I see merit in both approaches. There is a certain level of humanity, personability and coziness in old school forums that isn’t often or easily replicated in large communities generated by the modern social media format. But the other format also has its merits.

Imagine there’s an instance dedicated to engineering. It would obviously have the best askelectronics community. And lets say you’re a person that’s into plants and has an account on an instance dedicated to gardening. And now you want to ask a question to askelectronics. You’d first have to know about the existence, the name and/or the url of the engineers’ instance and then go there to get a good answer. That seems like a hassle and unlikely to happen. Mastodon has hundreds of instances.

What would instead happen, is that people would gravitate to a couple, two or three, large instances, that would become huge, most likely split on political grounds. And that’s, to be honest, kinda what’s already happening with lemmy, no? Maybe two or three additional instances, for, continents or something special, like an instance for official communities of projects. I feel like this future would lead to max 10 large politically echo-chambered instances.

If instead we really would get random topic based instances, things would be very different from reddit. You’d always start your posts with: “So… guys… what’s the best instance to ask this question on?”

And if this feature I suggested existed, with the opt in/opt out choice for communities, you could have the best of both worlds, with ease of use included. Actual technical, bandwidth, funding, scaling issues not withstanding, I haven’t considered that yet.

Maybe I’m wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m curious what other people think.

Among other things, I love that the EU has a presence on Mastodon: https://respublicae.eu/about and https://social.network.europa.eu/about , and not to mention it’s one of the funders of lemmy’s development, through https://nlnet.nl/ .

Putting money where the mouth is.

No.

Sciences are a subset of philosophy.

They ask different questions.

So, if I understood this correctly, this would result in some kind of “interactive” or “dynamic” color space, with relationships between colors changing based on the focused distances between them. Vaguely (very vaguely), like this gravitational lensing gif, but with colors changing, instead of shapes. Y’know, like a bulb-y color space. Interesting.

Friendica?

big boyes

solar energy in the enormous surface of these devices

There’s already a company making these

Looks like a swan.

Lemmy. If malevolent.

Facebook. If benevolent.

Bforartists was a lifesaver for beginners back when Blender had horrible UI.

These days default Blender’s UI has been improved immensely, but BFA is still great, even though slightly less necessary.

One of the down sides for beginners is most of the tutorials are for regular Blender, but it’s close enough.

Everybody here seems nice and civil, and I like that. I have no complaints.

There’s the occasional spambot, but they quickly get banned by mods.

Or “le mutiny” for added zest, in line with lemmy’s revolutionary tendencies, mirite?

Jokes aside, I like community.

Edit: If cross-instance same-named multireddits are ever to become a thing, I’d be okay with those being called sublemmies (y’know, like lemmy.ml/c/cheese+cheese@beehaw.org+cheese@sopuli.xyz, kind of thing, all under /f/cheese).

Meme: Russia, not communism.

Yogthos: Communism.

Edit: Also, as well, selective. Give stats for the Baltics, Poland, Czechia, etc… ex-yu is irrelevant, as it’s about Russia, not communism. No offense, but it’s like you’re literally Mel Gibson in the meme. :P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

“Attempts to duplicate the paradox of choice in other studies have had mixed success.” … "This phenomenon in particular has come under some criticism[3] due to increased scrutiny of scientific research related to the replication crisis and has not been adequately reproduced by subsequent research,[4] thereby calling into question its validity. "

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice article, ty for the post.

Noise pollution is a real thing, I experience it on the daily.

Just one of the reasons electric cars, public transit, and bicycles are great, not just for combating air pollution and global warming.

You don’t need to, but it would be healthy.