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.