why aren't the posts for each community replicated across instances?
or maybe at least the posts wouldn't be replicated, but there would only be one community, and when you visit it, posts for the community are downloaded from your primary instance, as well as other instances based on some configuration that makes sense.
Because those are all different communities with different moderators. Think of the "subreddit" name as the full name of the community AND server.
Likely what will happen is one of them will "win out" with amount of activity. But here is the good news. If the moderators get on a power trip or things go south, everyone just switches to another one.
Since email is the common analogy, I would extend that to say that you could be John.Smith@gmail. You might also have John.Smith@outlook. Someone else has John.Smith@yahoo. If you wanted, you could setup a new account John.smith@protonmail, or start your own server and be [email protected]
good point with being able to switch to another if a mod goes haywire. but i think that there just shouldn't be any mods -- or rather, the community members should moderate themselves via some algorithm that uses votes, discussion, etc. to hide/remove posts. you could choose to view a hidden post that has been downvoted a lot if you want.
The idea behind a decentralized network is that is decentralized. Each of those "ask lemmy" communities is independently run from each other and can impose different rules and moderation. If you don't like how one community is being run, you can easily block it without missing much. With federation you can also easily subscribe to all of those communities to make them all seem bigger than what they really are.
What would be nice though is being able to make a custom feed of only your "ask lemmy" communities. That way you get a pseudo "centralized" feed of ask-lemmy-ness. Right now you'd need to jump from one to the next which is kind of a pain.
correct. so let's have a way to "connect" communities, a way for any 2 communities on 2 different instances (or the same instance) to "merge" their content, even if they have different names (e.g. "games" "gaming"). now maybe this could be user-defined, a per client thing, like multireddits, but with a recommendation on each community page that shows the most frequent "client community-merge-configurations"
Why are Mails @outlook.com not visible in @gmail.com? They could be replicated, since it is both mail...
Different servers, different Communitys. Federation makes it possible to see all of them. It would be cool to post in multiple Communitys at once. Like a CC in mail. That would be the right way imo
SPF broke email forwarding, in order to give us 6 months without spam back in 2014.
Now you need to implement SRS to forward, but it is gennerally easier to pull email from X by Y