this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.
As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that's a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.
Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically "unaffiliated".
What I am thinking as a possible solution would be to have some type of "community server", akin to email list servers. The admin of the server becomes a "mere" service provider, and those that create communities are then responsible for moderation and that content being hosted there.
I believe that this would be perfectly possible to implement with Lemmy, so much so that I will add some of this functionality to Fediverser as part of my NLNet grant. The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?
Would you be able to prevent admins to interfere with moderation of the communities? Seems to be the biggest issue here
Theoretically, any admin would still have access to the server and make changes to things.
Practically, no. Anyone providing this service would be a hosting provider. If something bad happens at the community, they would only be able to claim it's not their responsibility if they are able to point to the actual moderator who is liable.
Interesting