Quacksalber

After having spent some time on Lemmy and learning of the intricacies of the different Lemmy instances, I think the landing page for the Lemmyverse could do with some streamlining. I remember that back when I joined, the only information I used to decide on an instance to join was the user count, the signup policy and the instance name. Now, coming from the instance with the best name, I can't say that I've regretted my choice, but for new people looking to join Lemmy, crucial information that would help them join the instance best suited for them is still missing.

To provide that information, I want to suggest the creation of multiple categories, in which instance owners are encouraged to describe their instance. Instances that provide a description for each category are then ranked higher on the join-lemmy.org website.

The following categories would, in my opinion, help new users decide on an instance to join:

Content Policy
This category could describe what kind of content the instance wants to specialize in. Whether that be sports, games, specific sports teams or games, NSFW content, meme content, etc.

Signup Policy
The website already shows whether an application needs to be filled out, but it doesn't show what is expected of the applicant. A category describing what exactly the instance would like to see in their new users would help those users decide, if that instance is for them or not.
As an example, an instance focussed on a certain language could inform users, that they expect an application in that language.

Community creation Policy
Here, instances could describe what rules they have around community creation. Small instances could, for example, clarify in this category, that they would only want to host niche communities without much traction at most. Other servers could specify that they would only want to host unique communities, not copies of or communities closely related to communities already existing on other instances.

Federation Policy
Here instance owners could clarify their stance on what other instances they are willing or not willing to federate with. To give an example, instances could describe their stance on federating with other instances hosting NSFW content, possibly illegal content (lemmy.world and /c/piracy), overly political content, and so on and so forth.

Lastly, some statistics could be added to show the health of the instance: Active user to inactive user ratio, active user to report ratio, active user/report to mod action ratio, community engagement ratio, uptime, server software version and so on.

With these categories, I can say that if I were to join the Lemmyverse today, I'd be able to make a much more informed decision on what instance to join.

I think the way federation currently works spells doom for the fediverse, should any service of it get major traction. Currently, if you subscribe to a community on Lemmy or follow a user on Mastodon, your instance will pull the content of that instance/user and make it available for all to see and interact with. What seems like a good idea to spread content however is becomming the achilles heel of the fediverse: The admins of Lemmy/Mastodon instances are liable in many juristictions for the content their servers are distributing. This means in practice that many Lemmy/Mastodon instances block NSFW content for example, as the admins, understandably so, are either unwilling or incapable of making sure they are not running afoul of any laws.

As such, I think that the fediverse needs to offer a way for users to follow content from other instances without having that content be stored, let alone shared by their home instances.

A question I have at this point is where this criticism is best levied against. Is it the job of Lemmy/Mastodon to provide such a form of federation, or does the ActivityPub protocol needs to be ammended?