When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It’s the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue with Lemmy/kbin not talking nicely, or is this how the Fediverse is?
Is it (at least theoretically) possible for me to post an article on https://kbin.social/m/startrek and have it automatically show up on https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek, or are they always going to be two separate communities?
I would suspect that it’s because when these instances were coming online a week or two back there weren’t any other instances around, so having them be general-purpose was good. The Threadiverse can’t “afford” special-purpose instances until there’s already a large number of people around.
It also could be that people want their instance to be the instance for that community, or they want to be in control of the community, not someone else. It’s also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation (having a @timbervale, a @timbervale, and a @timbervale could lead to a whole bunch of confusion).
It doesn’t matter if an instance wants their instance to be “the” instance for a community, they don’t get to decide that for the whole Fediverse. It’s up to the users.
Usernames should be interpreted in the same context as email address. I am FaceDeer@kbin.social, the “@kbin.social” part is as much a part of my username as the “FaceDeer” part.
The UI should probably be displaying it more prominently than it is, that’s a bug that Kbin should resolve at some point.
You’re right, but the current tradition and momentum are towards using short display names; virtually every service that has a public-facing feature uses display names (even most email clients put the first and last name of the users instead of their actual email addresses).
We definitely should be using the full bit on kbin/lemmy, though, as it’s so critical to the idea of the Fediverse, you’re 100% correct on that.
The current tradition may simply have to change when it comes to the Fediverse, because the Fediverse doesn’t work that way. It can’t work that way because instances are independent of each other. There’s no central authority that can decide which one gets to have the “startrek” community name or the “FaceDeer” username.
If you want there to be a central authority to decide that stuff, then you don’t want the Fediverse.