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.
If the Lemmy instance isn’t public anyway, then it seems like its federation list doesn’t have to be public either, so other instance admins would have no way of knowing what such an instance federates with.
Can you leave comments from your non public isntance on communities from other instances ?
Yes. I have seen comments before from obscure instances that didn’t seem to be open to the public. It wouldn’t really make much technical sense to prevent that.
ok, clearly I don’t understand the federation protocol then, because I thought if you can see/interact with the instance (like in the @ after the username), you can find out who they federate with.
I don’t know if that’s true if they don’t publish a list of that. I certainly wouldn’t know how.