this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
421 points (99.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
807 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, so do you literally see the same exact posts twice if you do that? Super annoying but filtering duplicates in the background seems like something that could be easily fixed (unless I'm missing something). Hopefully more interest will lead to more open source contributors!
No, that's not what I meant :-).
For example:
It's like there is an r/technology and an r/tech with only small differences. Hopefully they'll either become more different or somehow merge
This is what I think people need to understand. This problem also occurred on Reddit frequently. In the early days there were multiple subreddits for a single topic and over time with growth, one of them won out. I doubt lemmy.ml and beehaw.org's technology communities are both going to grow at the same rate. Eventually one will get bigger faster and become the de facto tech community.
The only problem I find with this approach is that it will favour the "main" instances, thus recentralizing the app.
I don't even think it's an approach so much as an inevitability that certain communities will grow and develop into the de facto ones for their respective subjects. Especially because people are attracted to communities where they can find more discussions. But yeah, I really hope the communities don't all just end up pooling in the largest instance. Hopefully they grow and develop across many smaller instances.
There are probably better solutions but I guess simplest way would be to solve that at the client end?
Give users the option to merge community views from different instances (maybe too much hassle for the average user), have the client do it automatically for some specified communities, or have a mechanism by which the communities can hint the client to merge their content with specific "friend" communities.
From users POV the last option would be the easiest (but it should be possible to opt out of it or customize the behaviour). To prevent trolling and harassment the merging would require an authentication from all participating communities. That doesn't prevent multiple posts on the same subject but if majority of users see the same combined content the likelihood of double posts decreases. It would still spread the load between instances, and if they want the different instances could specialize on different aspects of the subject.
Just a thought. I don't know if it makes any sense from technical point, maybe it would be easy to implement without any changes on the underlying protocols or maybe it would require some ugly kludges and would just overcomplicate everything or is something not many people would even need or want.
This is why Iโm desperate for Apollo to come to the fediverse. Christian would absolutely build these features in and it would make the entire fediverse more accessible.