It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.
It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.
It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.
Thoughts?
Yes, it would be changing how federation works and I would actually oppose a change that says a “user instance” and “content instance” can’t be the same server. It’s a perfectly normal architecture though to have a management, worker, and database service use any combination of 1, 2, or 3 servers. This just seems like a decoupling from a monolith into microservices.
I agree with you.
The future is going to be different than one monolithic website and I think ultimately everyone just needs to relax for 6 months or a year and just get a feel for how all of this settles over time.
Part of the federated future is that we are going to lose content from time to time. Maybe someday someone solves that but this is what a link aggregation ecosystem with no central leadership looks like, and that’s ok.