this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?
This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.
(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)
Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:
spoiler
When creating an account the backend can automatically create a community thats the same as your username. make you the mod, and enable mod only posts to the community by default. On the update to the new version with the Follow User Feature a script can run to auto create communities with the names of users.
The script can also change any usernames that exist with the same name as a current community and add a U at the end of the user (an extremely small amount of users would be affected and usernames aren’t as important as preserving community names/urls)
Then we just need to follow the community of the same name as the user to follow them. The way mastodon already federates with Lemmy currently would allow you to recurve updates whenever the user posts to their own community since only they (and assigned mods) can post to their community.
They probably wont implement due to potential harrassment from abuse. But you can follow users using Open RSS feeds in meantime. Here's your feed for example:
https://openrss.org/programming.dev/u/nix@merv.news
How would this open you up to abuse? Having a community with the same name as your username auto created where only you can post new threads wouldn’t open you up to abuse. But it would greatly benefit interoperability throughout the fediverse. Lemmy is currently the least interoperable fediverse software while also being the second most used. I also think its the most valuable since up/down voting and threaded replies makes the most valuable information the easiest to come by and follow. So it would be great for the best fediverse software to also be better at playing nice with the rest of the fediverse
I'm not against adding user-following, in fact I'd envisioned that we'd eventually add it way down the road. It'd just be a ton of work, and I have a backlog thats years-long, so its not anything I'll be taking on anytime soon.
And lemmy is primarily a link-aggregator first, with a focus on following communities, rather than a micro-blogging platform with a focus on following people.
It'd make more sense to me to have user feeds separate from communities so you can have overlapping names without issue