[lijogdfljk]

> then why would you be concerned who mastodon.art is federated with? wouldn’t you just join there and enjoy the specific community…

Because the community is closed, currently lol.

> these seem to entirely contradict each other.

Yea, i think we agree? My point was (roughly) that Federation contradicts being part of a community if you rely on Federation to be part of the community.

Ie don't use federation if you need to be part of a specific community. And in my case, well, i guess i just don't join lol. If the community is at max capacity, too late. Maybe one day they open, but such is life. Federation isn't designed for this, it seems, and that's fine. "This" being, distributing a community. It seems communities are centralized.

[rakoo]

We agree fundamentally: federation is not compatible with community-on-a-server, and the latter is being phased out by the Mastodon devs. The future is in groups that can span multiple servers and fully use federation.

[lijogdfljk]

Ooo neat, i'll have to look into Groups. Thanks!

[rakoo]

Right there's https://a.gup.pe/ but it's a hack and isn't meant to work long term. The long term thing is proper group actors and stuff in ActivityPub, and it's being discussed here I believe: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/standardizing-on-activ...