this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Damn, since I saw the warning thread I was hurrying my slow ass to back up my stuff, which I gladly did (some days ago), lemmy.zip is my new home now.
I feel sorry for the users that didn't get the chance to backup their stuff... An auto backup feature for Lemmy backend might be worth checking out perhaps?
At the very least, social networks like this really need a two server type system: the authenticator who identifies that you are really who you say you are and handles personal settings, communication, and access to the fediverse, and the content provider that hosts the communities.
How do you ban users in this scenario?
What do you mean? The authenticator instance could ban users, the moderators and the content provider instances could ban users, content provider instances could defederate from authenticator instances and viceversa.
Not sure I'm seeing the issue you are seeing, it's just basically forcing lemmy instances to instead of being both to just be one or the other. The benefit is that the actions on one is free from the drama on the other. One would be dedicated to hosting users, the other would be dedicated to hosting communities, less burnout overall.
Complete bans (at the home instance level) would require synchronization between the content provider instance and the authenticator instance.
Mod actions are caused by users comments on content, so the two aspects are closely intertwined, you can't dissociate the content from the users.
At the moment, admins synchronize in a group to deal with toxic users, usually leading to the ban of those users on their home instance. Having a split between two types of admins adds an additional layer that could actually increase the admins workload.
Since he said that the authenticator is the one that handles the communication & access, I expect banning the person from the authenticator would already automatically prevent anyone using that authenticator (or any other authenticator federating with it) from seeing the content.
As I understand it, the only thing the content provider would do is hosting the data. But access to that data would be determined by the service doing the access control, in the same way current instances are doing it.
Hosting involves removal of content, which is triggered by actions performed by users.
At the moment, if a Lemmy.world user spams CSAM content everywhere, other admins can reach out to the LW admins, they ban the users and purge the content.
In a users/content model, with Lemmy.users and Lemmy.world still being the content, other admins have to reach out to the Lemmy.users instance, get them banned, then to the Lemmy.world admins to trigger the purge of the content on the communities.
On top of that, it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts, as report federation will be fixed in Lemmy 1.0, not released yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3781
The main part of the "admin burnout" comes from the management of users. There isn't really that much to manage on the content part that isn't linked to users.
Exactly. That means instances would not longer have that responsibility. That would be on the hosting service, meaning less pressure for the instance. Once they ban the user, the content would not be shown, it would be purged from the federating network of that instance, regardless of whether the hosting service actually deletes it or not (but I expect it would be better if the protocol makes it so banning a user sends a notification to the hosting service).
It's more complex than that, at the moment, because the purge also involves mirrored content in other federating instances. The interesting part is that after it's triggered, then the process is pretty much automatic. When purging, Lemmy.world admins don't have to manually go around asking to all the other instances to delete the content. The purge request is currently being notified automatically to instances federating with it. Why would it be any different for a content hosting service?
At that point, the content instances would be merely storage. This model is already possible now, but the vast majority of instances host both users and content, because it is more interesting to have users to build a local community than just being a storage server.
If some admins were interested in only being storage servers, you would see more instances not allowing user registrations, but all the 35th most active instances allow them: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
There have been cases where federation deletion was not processed correctly, so it would add an additional layer of potential issue
As I stated above, it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts, as report federation will be fixed in Lemmy 1.0, not released yet:
What that means is that on top of your Lemmy.user account, you would need a Lemmy.content account that would be able to fully moderate the community as a local account. Users don't like to juggle between different accounts to moderate and participate.