Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about coding or how this stuff works in the background.
But I’m a fairly old reddit user excited with Lemmy who thinks that the the limitation to the creation of communities is a good thing and that there’s always a chance to make stuff differently.
The concept I would like to brainstorm is: branching.
Instead of simply giving the ability to create new communities to users, would it be possible (and desirable) to just branch existing communities? As an example, let’s imagine that DnD discussions start to dominate the gaming community (yeah, I know, it’s just for theoretical hypothesis). Could the mods at a certain point decide to create a sub community for DnD inside the gaming community? When people would subscribe to “gaming” they would see the existing branches and decide if they want to subscribe to gaming in general or just that one set of games in particular. Apart from the benefit to the user, a mapping of Lemmy’s communities would also be much more easy to visualize.
I don’t know… this just occurred to me and wanted to share.
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Keep in mind that this limitation only on beehaw.org
Other Lemmy instances such as allow you to create communities freely. For example lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz
The way federation works is that as a user of one instance you can read posts and comment from and to any other instance. That is how I can reply to this post even though my account is on lemmy.ml
What is not federated yet is community creation. Currently you can only create a community on an instance you have an account in and it so happens that beehaw on which you are has community creation disabled.
The idea is that it should not matter too much which instance you join, but you’ll find a few differences between instances such as the ability to create a community or not, the existence of downvotes, etc…
That makes everything clearer. I see now that instances can be created with completely different rules (i had already noticed the “no downvotes” option) Thank you for that.
It’s great to have all this different flavours in the save universe.
My next inquiry will be about clicking that colored symbol (maybe a fediverse icon?!) and being taken to a mastodon page. That really confused me. Especially because I’m also on mastodon, with the same username but the two accounts (lemmy/beehaw and mastodon) are not connected… It’s really confusing for me.
Lemmy and Mastodon can talk to each other, not fully but especially Mastodon can see and write to Lemmy communities (although posts are ordered by publishing date since it can’t understand upvotes). What the icon does is show you a comment or post on the original instance it was sent from.
If a Mastodon user sends a comment to Lemmy that icon will link to the same post but as seen on the original instance it was sent from.
I think having different communities for the same topics could be interesting and a good feature. No reason why subscribing to multiple version of “gaming” for instance couldn’t be just as easy, and could allow for variations in rules and type of content posted.
