this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone's subscriptions to a different one, so that we don't have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.
I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just... didn't show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.
What's bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one... and then switched back to having two?? It's weird and I don't understand why they did it.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it.
2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative.
3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong.
4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
Agree it isn't simple. "We want control without control"
1.- That would make Lemmy servers ultra unsafe to host. Server owners would not be able to moderate content hosted in their machine. It would make a good distributed solution, but not a federated one.
Maybe we’d prefer a centralized organization, with distributed resources. But seeing the defederation drama every week, it doesn’t look the path anyone wants to follow.