Communities on different instances about the same topic should have the option to essentially federate so a post on one appears on all of them and opening any of them shows you the comments from all of them. This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post. Federation could be decided by the community mods and the comments can have a little “/c/communityname@instance.name” on it so you know which community the comment was originally posted on.
Yeah seeing same article about american politics posted cross half dozen communities on different instances really is killing my feed.
Sounds like clients need to improve. Detect posts with same links and group them. Maybe server side allow users to categorize or tag their communities so it’s easier on client to organize them. Clients should also allow the user to set rules and conditions on those feeds.
Problem is we can’t have both ways. You can’t force all users to receive all news posts into a single feed and claim it’s distributed. Features. We need more features on the client side to solve these problems and improve the experience.
We have to get out of this 90s software architecture mindset and start thinking bigger. We don’t want to limit ourselves and build another Reddit because someone dislikes the growing pains of a new platform.
I like the idea. I suspect it would make moderation a challenge but it sounds pretty useful
If all federated communities could decide upon to regulate same rules, every one of them could be moderated by their own moderators. But the problem I see here is the things that’s being federated is in reality server itself which means it would be impossible(not sure but at least not necessary) to do such a thing. But anyone can easily build an app to collect posts from same communities, it does not require to play with activitypub, just lemmy api.
This was the idea behind MultiReddits if I’m not mistaken. In which case a simple operator like:
Fediverse@lemmy.world+Fediverse@lemmy.ml
Could get baked into the Lemmy core to allow this to work.
I asked the Lemmy devs about multi-reddits type subscribing and they said that it’s on their list but they need help developing it because they have a huge list. I like the multiereddits way because then the user decides and there isn’t extra mods (managers) sprinkled in.
That’s the way I think it should work.
That’s still just two separate communities. Like a filter. That’s fine. That’s not what OP is suggesting though. What OP is suggesting is much more extreme.
What are MultiReddits and how do they work?
Basically you can see multiple subreddits of your choosing as if they are a single subreddit.
Oh wow, that can be beneficial to some people. Thank you for taking the time to explain
On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone’s All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.
To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix that issue.
Keeping communities separate is the simplest way to go, tbh. Sharing karma could lead to weird brigades, like r/ScreenshotsAreHard cross-posting from every picture of screens on the Fediverse and then mass-downvoting from there.
To me, the best solution would be to implement multireddits. That way, you can have your cat multilemmy of 100 communities without affecting your main feed, but you could also do the same for related or identical communities. Plus, moderators could create a multilemmy and display it prominently in their sidebar.
Being able to subscribe to a multi would solve that issue
Wouldn’t a multilemmy still run into an issue where duplicate posts or cross posts show up multiple times in a feed?
Even if we wanted to solve that problem, right now there is no way to cross-post on Lemmy. There’s a cross-post button, but it actually does a repost. I think we should think about that when Lemmy implements a cross-post feature in the first place.
There is a really interesting dev discussion on this topic here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033
There are requests for this in the works. If I didn’t have almost 1000 comments I would find the links but there’s no search function for comments :/
Ah I found it!
https://lemmy.world/post/318115
All 3 of those links are broken. For some reason you put [1], [2] or [3] in each URL.
I agree with this 100%. It would also help with QOL since I won’t need to follow a bunch of the same communities spread out over numerous instances.
No, then there is no point to Lemmy being federated at all.
Better to just have each community develop their own flavor on the same topic imo
I mostly agree with this, but I also think there should be some way of being able to collate the same 5 communities on 5 different instances under 1 view. I said this when I first came onto the Fediverse, but maybe having a tagging system for each instance would allow for both; users could look up instances with, say, a “news” tag and get every instance with that tag - and this way, the communities would still be separate and can develop differently from one another.
I like the idea of a distributed community where everyone can see posts from any other instance they federate with.
You could have two types of community, one federated local and one federated global, and the former acts like current communities, and the latter would act like a big pot everyone throws stuff into, and local instance mods could set which instances to accept and deny posts and comments from, and which instances to federate moderation actions from
Each lemmy Server should’ve been it’s own subreddit.
It still could
Definitely not.
For every individual community you would have to pay for a domain, maintain the instance, keep it updated, keeping it secure, and keeping it paid. That’s really difficult already with a single server, let alone multiple for multiple servers and domains. These are also more points where data from other servers can be cached and get hacked/leaked or outright incompatible Lemmy versions.
It’d also still have the problem of multiple communities with the same topic, so it’s not solving anything.
How do you expect people to migrate to Lemmy if these are the ridiculous hoops they’re expected to do to start a community. Instead, they can just go to reddit and click a “create subreddit” button instead. What option do you think they’d choose?
I’ve had that thought too- it would guarantee instance owners are dedicated to making one community as awesome as they can, but at the same time the current structure means non-technically inclined people are able to have a home off-Reddit as long as their values align with the instance owner.
That said, Startrek.website is kinda doing a focused-topic thing with different communities and rules within to achieve different goals working with the same subject matter. I think it could serve as a good model for themed instances.
Who moderates it?
If communities have agreed to federate with each other, mod status should federate and mods of any of the federated communities should be able to moderate any content.
If it’s one way (e.g. !technology@lemmy.world absorbs content from !technology@lemmy.ml but not the other way around) then the absorbing instance lemmy.world can moderate all content but it doesn’t federate to lemmy.ml.
i can’t decide if a one-way-moderation-scheme-type-thingy like that is beautifully simple solution, or one fraught with annoying hidden complications lol that’s a sick idea.
I think it would work if you didn’t overcomplicate it.
NO.
Once again, I don’t feel like people quite understand the big picture. They see an issue and resort to old, simplified solutions that are designed to solve problems on non fediverse platforms.
Options we want options! We don’t want to hard code things one way or another. We want data and APIs, then it’s up the client to put it together in way that makes sense.
I’m all for adding a category “tag” on a community to further the ability to organize a feed. But it should be up to the user/client to decide to allow / group s show the communities in a pleasing way. DO NOT FORCE THINGS INTO PEOPLES FEED.
These “ideas” that people keep coming up with are nice and start good discussions, but most of them keep trying and to force fediverse apps into being reddit , twitter or whatever else.
Even thinking of it in terms of non-fediverse platforms. reddit often had multiple subreddits about the same exact topic. But the communities were different, often even splinters from each other because of disagreements on content and moderation. You end up with the original sub, Foo, followed by FooMemes, and TrueFoo, TrollFoo, FooJerk, etc.
If communities start getting merged together automatically, it’s going to end up causing problems. Most likely the culture of someplace like lemmy.ml will end up being marketedly different than some other instances (and already is). I would not want posts from a memes group there mixed with a memes group from elsewhere. Grouping the same post client side, sure. But there’s a reason for separate groups about the same topic.
ehhhh, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! personally i think it makes vastly more sense to federate on a per community basis rather than a per instance basis. an instance is most likely going to hold a vast array of users and topics in an ideal world, in which case the general consensus on what is and what is not considered to be relevant or desirable content for the given group is likely quite difficult-- there’s nothing to go on, as everyone’s talking about different things and holds markedly different values because of it. But communities? Perfect sense! Every community is about a very specific subject/topic, and comes with a set of rules/values for everyone who wishes to post/interact with it. Once you get to the granularity of federated communities, it no longer feels quite so high handed to federate or de-federate with something, because the general consensus of the community is assumedly much more clear.
Sure, leaving automatic federating up to the client makes sense, but the meat of it sounds like a much better level of granularity for decision-making for something that impacting than it being server-wide…
But perhaps I am simply way off mark. my experience is small, in comparison to my conviction lol.
You are literally describing reddit. Allowing mods to federate communities together would be novel.
The beauty of the fediverse is that when one volunteer-run server goes down (as happens all the time) there is little disruption if your feed is filling with other instance’s content. You can’t count on these volunteer-run servers to have 99.9% uptime like reddit, they can disappear over night.
Same idea for communities. If lemmy.world disappears tomorrow there are dozens of communities that disappear with it; fragmented across the fediverse. If mods of those communities were federated with complementary communities on other instances then there is no disruption.
I don’t think that communities should automatically federate, it should be agreed to by the mods. But with the current population we can’t afford to keep identical communities isolated. Many will die a slow death when together it could have been thriving.
This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post.
I thought that’s more or less how it’s supposed to work now: if someone on instance A subscribes to a community on instance B, the community gets cached on instance A; and users there can post to it locally (and see each other’s posts) even if it temporarily can’t re-sync with instance B.
Is that now how it works in practice?
I think a more reasonable approach would be client side. I haven’t thought out the implementation but I’m sure if you brought it to the attention of some devs that have clients they’d be open to the idea.
Not something I’m interested in.
My instance aggressively defends the rights of trans folk and other minorities, so the moderators and the admins of any communities based on our instance will come down hard on transphobes and the like.
That’s just not true of most of the rest of the threadiverse though, which means that merging just wouldn’t work
How would this be any different then how it works now? Banned users would still be banned on your instance
Oh no someone has a different opinion than you REEEE permaban the “transphobic”.
Welcome to the bubble.
Exhibit A
you are an example of why they’re so strict about it
Gotta say I like merged communities better than just multireddits. The problem we’re trying to solve is that one community of 1000 people is more than 10x better than 10 communities with 100 people, because instead of a bunch of posts or comments with less than 5 upvotes you get true content curation.
Would have to be voluntary and maybe there could be two levels, one where mods can only mod what is “truly” posted to their instance, and another where any mod can moderate anything in the combined community.
