efenex

Fgbd009 OP , 11 months ago

From what I noticed some of the communities that the posts don't appear are nsfw and require you to sign up if you are going through their instance, but since is federated why while being logged in in kbin the posts are not visible?

Prouvaire OP , 1 year ago

3. BRING OVER SOME CONTENT WHEN FIRST FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

When an instance first federates a community, it should bring across at very least the last (let's say) 100 threads or the last (let's say) 7 day's worth of threads from that community (plus associated comments), whichever is greater.

This will prevent the following scenario: A user finds a community that's hosted on another instance, joins the community, but then finds no evidence of activity on their instance, because when an instance federates a community, it only starts pulling across posts from that moment in time. It makes it look like the community is dead, even if it isn't. While there may be a "Browse this community on the original instance" message, but that may well confuse people, and it doesn't mitigate the initial impression that the community has not posts.

Related to this - any pinned posts from a community should also be brought across by default, as these posts often contain information that a new user will find useful or that the moderators want all users to be aware of.

4. IDEALLY BRING OVER (OR ALLOW TO BE SEARCHED/SORTED) ALL CONTENT WHEN FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

The shelf life of posts in most communities is pretty short. If you subscribe to /news it probably doesn't matter if you can't see the top-ranked post from three years ago. But other communities curate content that has a much longer shelf life. A community like /askhistorians for instance, or /buyitforlife, where a user might want to search the archives for a great overview on the events leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall, or recommendations for the best compression socks. Allowing new users to search the complete history of a community, or sort posts by something like "most upvoted by all time", makes the community more useful.

So ideally if you subscribe to a community hosted on another instance on your home instance you should be able to browse/search/sort that community's entire archive.

I know you can click a link to browse a community on the original instance, but that can be confusing because suddenly you are now browsing on a site where you do not have an account.

Copying over the entire database for a community has storage/bandwidth implications (although I would argue data consumption issues are inherent to the fediverse model, which could lead to another discussion around the fediverse's scalability limitations). But perhaps there is a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the host instance of a community (which presumably has the most complete database) rather than the local instance.