I’ve seen around 3 occasions of that this week, altho I have never seen anything like it before.
if I remember correctly they were:
- smack talking a mod (FlyingSquid) for saying not to report the same comment twice, when they were different comments, and the report was spam
- someone comparing .world with .ml in politics (as in there was a comment saying "this post will be overrun with .ml people, and then a comment going “but you are from .world”) (Maybe Im part of the problem? I have been called out for being a fascist because I questioned the “puching nazis” theme)
- one more which I can’t remember.
Anyways, what is all that about? Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?
No, the whole point for the federation is to share the content. For one, it allows redundancy so that if a rogue mod or admin decided to delete a bunch of stuff, then every other instance still retains copies of what came from it.
But that said, having to keep everything up to the second, in batches of a single action, is extremely limiting. If I downvote someone with an accidental button press, then undownvote them, then upvote - that could have been just one net interaction to send, but instead it is three.
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so it would stick out like a sore thumb*. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I’m aware that it’s a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you’re registered to, it’s already addressing the main needs:
*currently you can only find a piece of removed content if you know that it exists.