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 I remember hearing it correctly, some lemmy instance admins defederate by proxy. Meaning: they go look at your instance, see who you federate with (even if you do it passively by not blacklisting) and then defederate you if you federate with any instances they don’t like.
(And tbh, I’d do the same, but it doesn’t seem like OP would like that)
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, 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.
I think you should be able to decide which forums and cross-domains users you host and federate with on your own server, but not which cross-domains and forums your users interact with on other servers.