Will the other interfaces offering communities support use Steemit, Inc. Hivemind node(s) or have their own?
The more I learn about communities, the more interesting things I find out, but for now a question, possibly an issue in the future (I don't think it will be one in these initial stages).
We know Hivemind communities don't operate at the blockchain level, however the posts we write for communities, comments, votes, and generally all accounts interacting, they are all on the blockchain, and that's what prevents censorship.
But the fact that Hivemind communities don't operate at the blockchain level, and the code is public, could in theory, make it that different interfaces will run different Hivemind nodes.
I don't think this will happen, at least not in the first phase, because that would be another node to pay for, if you keep it yourself.
Running different nodes would be great, helps with decentralization, but if the code would be different, or databases different on the two nodes, we would have some synchronization issues, as far as I understand it.
Let's say steemit.com will use their Hivemind communities node.
A different app X will use another node. Highly customized code or at least a different database.
Let's say a moderator from community ABC mutes user xyz on steemit.com. Will this action be reflected on the other app X? In this situation, I believe it wouldn't, unless the databases synchronize (or they use the same database / same node).
Of course, some interfaces will do that on purpose, to break away from the standard logic, and that's ok. But in most cases, I believe that wouldn't be the ideal way this should work, as it would create confusion if a user would be muted for community ABC on steemit.com and not muted on app X.
I may very well be completely off base with this, and this is either a non-issue or there are already ways to synchronize the databases. But I suppose it doesn't hurt to raise the issue.
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Changing the soft-consensus can lead to ui forks, but it's in developer's best interest to be interoperable. The goal is that devs can extend communities for their own needs, but any changes that can benefit everyone should be part of core logic.
I haven't heard much about the implementations of communities by SteemPeak or eSteem, which I heard will be in front line introducing Hive communities, but I suppose they will use the Hive node and API's from Steemit, Inc. So, that shouldn't be a problem.
Unless they change any critical logic, we can all run the same nodes and be in sync. And I would strongly encourage any changes (caveat: which make sense for most/all UIs) to be added to core. I'm sure some apps will want to extend communities with "extravagant" features, and that's great, but we need to make sure core does not get bloated.
Looks like you guys will have to be careful about the core/extra features balance. On one end with more things added to the core you don't have to worry about synchronization problems, but as you said core can get bloated. On the other side too few changes added to the core, and more at the app level will likely result in sync issues.