Prouvaire

It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - [email protected] then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

I just love how pervasive the hate

The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.

That’s how I read it too.

I’ve been thinking of starting a theatre-focused kbin instance, but realistically not until the platform has matured, as my sysadmin days are well, well, well behind me. In the meantime I’ve started a Musicals magazine on kbin.social.

I wonder if the activitypub protocol (or, if not the protocol then some other layer) allows for the idea of “community mirrors”. The way that the protocol works at the moment, as I understand it, only the host instance has a complete record of a community’s posts and comments. But if there was a way for a community to designate one or more other instances as “mirrors” which maintain a complete sync of a community’s content (going back all the way to the community’s founding), that would lower the exposure to instances going down.

There would need to be a process (both technical and administrative) for a mirror to be designated as the new host instance should the original host disappear.

This would build in additional resilience into the fediverse model, by taking advantage of its distributed nature.