#lemmy/#kbin has a problem that #mastodon hasn’t even attempted to solve; groups and what happens when they get popular.
#Communities, #groups, #magazines, whatever they are called are implemented as #Actors in #ActivityPub. They are basically just *very* popular users who boost a *lot*.
You can’t just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @[email protected] or @[email protected] is going to get HOSED on the regular.
Why do these communities need long-term persistence? You could use a separate archive based on plain web server mirrors for anything worth preserving. Maybe it’s good that communities disappear and coalesce elsewhere, maybe it’s evolution. Maybe being forced to pick and choose what to archive and what to let go is a good thing.
AP is a very chatty protocol and to handle large world-scale groups requires additions like compressed digest distribution, mirrors and sharding. Threads are already fragmented by design so in the end it may be unworkable to follow large group threads.