The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

“Half” is stretching it. More like a slice: UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Spain and a slice of France.

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.

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.

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.

I hope you apply this same logic to Russia then too, or any other power block, for consistency’s sake.

The node-ipc incident going on clearly tells us West

Couple devs --> the West

Good one.

The simplest way to allow users to merge communities like this as they please, as opposed to having the moderators choose for them what communities will merge or having the communities auto-merge, or adding the topic umbrella over communities (which I think is an interesting idea), is to allow ”multi-communities” (like multireddits), so https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek+startrek@lemmygrad_ml+startrek@mywebsite_com would display all the community’s posts on one page.

Edit: To expand on how I see @Gwynne@lemmy.ml 's topic umbrella idea, each community would have a mandatory topic (not category, those already exist), that would by default be the same as the community’s name (but could be edited), and going to https://instance.tld/t/startrek would display posts from all the startrek communities on all instances.

I understand this is an advanced federation feature, so I don’t expect it made soon, I’m sure the devs have their hands full already, just an idea.