Evan Light<p>Federated link aggregators should not own individual topics. Topics should belong to the entire fedi.</p><p>Instance owned topics is just another form of centralization. </p><p>We should not only discourage topic diaspora (e.g., a "gaming" topic on beehaw is separate from a gaming topic on another instance) but engineer solutions to *allow* and default unification of content by topic across the fedi for link aggregation (but not force this).</p><p>(De)federation then becomes how we keep topics safe for our communities: blocking posts and comments from demonstrably unsafe instances.</p><p>This is a CAP distributed system problem. My instincts say that federated link aggregation is a different enough problem from federated blogging (mastodon) that we need federated instances to share content via a consensus algorithm and not the mastodon style of federation.</p><p>I wonder about the practicalities of making this work in the truly heterogenous system of the <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/fediverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>fediverse</span></a>. </p><p>Perhaps by having the federation members/instances themselves share capability and capacity metadata with the cluster so as to load balance intelligently? The alternative could be an unintentional DDOS due to a massive instance going offline, shedding traffic to instances too small to handle the load.</p><p><a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/linkaggregation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linkaggregation</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/cap" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cap</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/distributedsystems" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>distributedsystems</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/clustering" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>clustering</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/federation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>federation</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/fediverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>fediverse</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/decentralization" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>decentralization</span></a></p>