Use the power of the fediverse to share information and tedious tasks
What is the problem you are facing?
I thought we could use the power of the fediverse to avoid a lot of redundant work for admins, moderators and users. I was thinking of a specific thing but that could extend to other things of course.
For example, if I go to the artists page it is very rare that there are photos of the artists. Often there is a picture from an album to illustrate the portrait of an artist. You can edit the artists page to add a portrait photo, it's great but it can quickly take a lot of work, and this work which can be a little tedious does not even benefit other instances and I find that sad.
I was wondering if it might not be possible to automatically recover photos from other instances. For example, if I add photos of a few artists to my instance, that other instances can get them automatically if they don't have the portraits of the corresponding artists. It's also a smart way to leverage the strength of the federation without requiring each instance to do it manually. It would make the interface nicer and save a lot of work.
We can certainly imagine extending this principle to other things than artist photos.
What are the possible drawbacks or issues with the requested changes?
For that, I think it would be necessary that the administrators of the instances can check an option in the parameters of the federation, example: I agree to automatically retrieve artist photos from other instances and to share artist photos in my instance with others.
It should also be that when an instance modifies an artist's photo, it should be given priority. In this way the instances can always personalize this page with the photos they prefer.
It would be nice if in the edit form of an artist's page, next to the button (browse on the hard drive) we could (browse the photos shared on the fediverse) and choose the one we like the most for example. Or those under free license only etc.
It might also be necessary to create a page to manually validate the changes in order to avoid unpleasant surprises for instances.