I’ve introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they’re not into tech this is their first web forum.
I’ve explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that’s ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.
Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he’s registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.
And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.
This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.
Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.
Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.
Instance agnostic post and comment links need to be implemented as well, and would address the underlying challenge in “opening a post in another instance”.
Without content addressing that’s almost impossible
You can’t have content addressing because it’s mutable. On the other hand, UUIDs are made for that. There’s even multiple types of UUIDs made for distributed computing with namespaces and such.
Bluesky does strict content addressing with hashes plus post ID (unique per repository, this allows edits). So you can choose which version to refer to. If you need to archive or mirror stuff you can use the hash, and threads can have both methods so you can see which version of a comment somebody replied to, etc.
Clients can work around it by making a search on the home instance that filters by community id and submitter id. Something like this.