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.
Lemmy works by your posts propagating to other servers.
If you’re on server A, and I’m on server B, server B’s moderator can block all of server A. They can make it where I never see your content.
I think in order for this to work, you would need to make it so that the server admins cannot see the contents of the communication. It wouldn’t work with public content
At that point, you might be better off using something like Matrix or a similar encrypted chat option.