Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
wedistribute.org
Mike Macgirvin, the long-time developer that brought us Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, and the Zot protocol, is bringing his most powerful concept to the rest of the Fediverse: Nomadic Identity.
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Super disagree. A community at the protocol level can have just as much character as a community at the network level, but without most of the drawbacks. The "instance as community" idea was always a poor substitute for actual
Groups. The community shouldn't be a server that users are bound to; it should be aGroupthat has access controls and private memberships (if desired). The moderators get all the same benefits of maintaining a limited community with their own rules, but users aren't beholden to petty drama via instance blocks or defederation.That's one way to look at it, sure. But it fails to account for community dynamics. The fediverse is largely run by volunteers and funded by that small percentage of users that feel strongly committed to their particular instance. If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.
This is also why I doubt Bluesky federation will be ever anything but a novelty for some self-hosters.
I'm not saying I don't think instances should be able to use that model, only that I think that model should not be the dominant way of building a community on the fediverse. But I don't see why a user would be less attached to a community just because its hosted on a different server from them, especially on the threadiverse which is topic based and where users are most likely going to engage in multiple topics.
I think another way to look at it is that accounts are tightly coupled to instances, to the point of being a detriment. I've personally lost all of my data and had to start over from scratch 5 or 6 times due to servers suddenly going down over the years.
Groups are one way to abstract community functions up a level, and what's crazy is that Group Actors themselves could also have a similar thing. People have talked about merged cross-instance communities on Lemmy; this would be one way of enabling that.