I love the Fediverse – don’t get me wrong–, but the fact that Lemmy was built atop a profile-oriented streaming stack, and that server moderators get to decide what servers your personal identity gets to interact with, doesn’t sit right with me.
On a whim, a moderator could decide to defederate with one of your favorite servers for no reason at all.
I’m envisioning a server that authenticates you to other servers, accepts notifications to your personal inbox, and hosts its own forums.
One that can whitelist acceptable authentication servers, but doesn’t restrict the notifications to your inbox. And doesn’t restrict you from signing in elsewhere.
Because I shouldn’t have to be at the mercy of other moderators to communicate with people.
If I have an identity, I should be able to use it however I like.
So don’t let people create communities, right?
Then your whole instance would be controlled by you and your whole forum would be yours
The server moderator creates the community, or gives users permission to create communities on their server. I have no problem with that model.
Hosting servers basically have 4 functions:
Let’s say you’re running server at example.com, and I sign up. My username is bob. So, I’m bob@example.com.
Example.com has several local forums, but they lack a significant tech community. So, I go to example2.com, which has a large tech community. Using my login from example.com (and postMessages), I login to example2.com, as bob@example.com. Example2.com has example.com whitelisted as a valid authenticator. So, it will accept their users.
Let’s then say that Bob gets a reply at example2.com. Example2.com pushes a notification to example.com, where Bob can read it.
If you’re hosting it yourself, you wouldn’t be at the mercy of anyone else. You would get full control over your communication experience, along with any consequences that come along with that.
And, if a moderator of another instance defederates me?
If the other party doesn’t want to communicate with you, then what are you trying to achieve?
I think I’m missing something from your premise. Who are you trying to connect to in this case?
Lemmy works by your posts propagating to other servers.
If you’re on server A, and I’m on server B, server B’s moderator can block all of server A. They can make it where I never see your content.
I think in order for this to work, you would need to make it so that the server admins cannot see the contents of the communication. It wouldn’t work with public content
At that point, you might be better off using something like Matrix or a similar encrypted chat option.