The way I’m imagining it, it wouldn’t be microblogging, but I’m probably not describing it well. You’d still have communities with threads, unlike Mastodon. You’d just wouldn’t have people posting “to” those communities (unless maybe you intentionally wanted to).

It’s mostly a way to get at the same thing as merged comment threads, just in a way that feels like it would have fewer edge cases to me.

IMO copying communities from Reddit as-is was a mistake long-term, but was maybe necessary short-term so that people wouldn’t be confused. If I had my druthers, I’d make a new system where communities are uniquely identified purely as !UUID@lemmy.instance (though still with a human-friendly display name). You don’t get to create a community that namesquats something like !gaming@lemmy.world. All posts would be made with hashtags like Mastodon, and then each community would just configure “Include all posts with this tag in our community”. The big issue then is who moderates tags? I think a system like Bluesky has would work well, as you mention. People can moderate tags and other people can follow their work, or not.

If that was combined with seamless account/community migration, that would solve a lot of moderation issues. If you mod a community and the admins suck, just move it to a new instance. If the mods of a particular community suck, start your own. They won’t be able to monopolize a common name, so it’s much easier to get traction.

On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking

Lemmy is pretty good about that, actually. It’s interoperable with Mastodon via ActivityPub, and there’s other projects like MBin that work nicely with Lemmy.

Neat! Do you pick one instance to load comments from? I notice that this comment isn’t showing up immediately, so wondering if there’s federation delay or the like.

You’re both on .world, which isn’t federated with hexbear, which is the most annoying instance. They’ll brigade other communities, for example the recent thread over at https://jlai.lu/post/11504685 (view it from that instance to see the hexbear comments)

I browse all sometimes from an instance federated with hexbear and I roll my eyes quite a bit whenever I do

Not sure, sorry. I don’t really use Mastodon all that much, maybe somebody else knows?

Neat, thanks!

It would be nice if communities that are similar enough could “share” a comment thread, so you don’t end up with comments scattered over many different communities for the same link. The mods could toggle something in the settings and say “This other community is good and we’ll be OK sharing posts with them”. You also wouldn’t have to explicitly crosspost.

Some apps will collapse those into a single post, but not all of them, and not all the time. It would be nice if that were better.

It would be nice if there was a way to handle instance/user migrations. If an instance gets their domain name taken away, there’s no way AFAIK for the admin to say “Here’s our new location, with a verifiable signature”. Likewise there’s no way for a user AFAIK to move their account with a verifiable signature that the new one is still them. Ideally this could all happen automatically with signatures getting synced automatically and all that.

I’m sure it would be a lot of work and no idea if ActivityPub would get in the way, but it would give people a lot more assurance that they didn’t pick a server that will screw them over by going down.

What is [email protected] doing over with the red dots 🤔