"Tafkars stands for "The API formerly known as...", is written in Rust and is pronounced like "tough cars". Tafkars is an API proxy that allows apps to talk to Lemmy through a familiar API from a kinder time. The hope is that this will make it easy for app developers to support Lemmy with only minimal code changes." @fediverse
The individual communities, no, but where they are hosted is decentralized.
Might not be a big UX problem. If Apollo or RIF had their own instances, and defaulted the feed to “all,” not local, then the experience would probably feel similar to a lot of folks.
But Apollo’s instance might also have a million+ folks, so that could be a performance problem.
@emberwit@Ghostalmedia well they are in the sense that any account from across the fedi can contribute to them. I just posted this topic from my single user mastodon instance
Since I've joined lemmy, I've been thinking about some kind of "community merging" feature.
A "meta community" would be able to "follow" other communities across the fediverse and posts from followed communities would show up in the "meta community's" feed. Posts from followed communities would remain on their original instances, or they could be duplicated to the meta community's instance.
There are a lot of details to work out, but I think this would add a lot more usability to lemmy and the fediverse as a whole
I think a good solution would be to let communities mirror other communities. If several instances have similar communities, each community could choose to mirror the other on their instance. But I am no programmer, so maybe it is more complicated than it seems.
I guess this will be sorted out by itself, as people will be joining the most active communities regarding a topic - at one point the least actice communities of a topic will "die" out.