this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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The free fediverses should support concentric federations of instances (privacy.thenexus.today)
submitted 10 months ago by thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7235896

Here's how Kat Marchá describes caracoles:

"you essentially ask to join concentric federations of instances ... with smaller caracoles able to vote to federate with entire other caracoles.

And @ophiocephalic's "fedifams" are a similar idea:

Communities could align into fedifams based on whatever conditions of identity, philosophy or interest are relevant to them. Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many way"

The idea's a natural match for community-focused, anti-surveillance capitalism free fediverses, fits in well with the Networked Communities model and helps address scalability of consent-based federation.

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[–] Bluesheep@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Part of the problem here I think relates to scale.

If I invite a load of friends over to my house for a party, they might be in different rooms having different conversations but they’re all my friends in my house. No one cares who I let in or kick out, certainly not either of the next groups.

Let’s say I’m part of the committee for the local community hall. We let our halls out to clubs. Some of the committee go to some of the clubs. I might not be interested in what it is, but if someone I trust says they are OK, I’m OK.

At the local University they have a lot of spaces, each managed by the respective school. Each school has a slightly different ethos. Some of them might let their space to groups that other schools wouldn’t, but it’s not their call. They share some resources but not decision making.

We’ve got this problem emerging. The decisions made by lemmyworld or other large instances are generally in service to their communities, whereas on smaller or more focused instances the instance level decisions are the same as community level decisions.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 10 months ago

Very much agreed that part of the problem relates to scale -- and, great analogy! It's an interesting thought experiment: if each school had an Lemmy instance, how would they work together to host communities and make it easy for people (in all the schools) to find the communities they're interested in? If they each had a Mastodon instance, how would they share blocklists? And so on.

And great point about the different dynamics between large instances and smaller / more focused instances. There's always a question of which communities an instance sees itself as in service to -- and similarly there's always a question of which instances and communities the team developing the software is in service to.