this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2021
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Lemmy
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I mean, right now federation is in its infancy so more advanced federation options haven't really been implemented, and this isn't something you want done by default, because two communities focusing on different things might have the same name. For example, "trees" might be referring to cannabis (a joke that originated on Reddit), or a biology community about actual trees.
Makes sense not to do it by default, but I think the option to form a single coherent community across servers is crucial to avoiding platform-killing fragmentation. Otherwise what's even the point of being "federated?" It's just a bunch of separate servers.
Sure, but again I come back to the question of, what's the point of being federated then? I may as well just be using a local client to present me with a set of RSS feeds from different websites or something.
And that's how I'd assumed Lemmy was going to work until I saw this post. It seems intuitive to me that subs of the same name would at least have the option to "sync" across servers.
Why would !main@startrek.com be synced in any way with !main@starwars.com ? They have nothing to do with each other. Communities should stand on their own, and it should be the users choice which federated communities they subscribe to.
then what's the point of lemmy? a federated community is in a sense centralizing communication through multiple isolated servers. if each one is isolated from the other, and we have 10 different discussion hubs focusing on !chocolatecakes@cooking.com, !chocolatecakes@cookies.com etc, then the community is severely fractured and lemmy as a platform doesn't work as it doesn't take advantage of the integration at all. for it to work as a platform, cooking.com should be able to choose if it wish to include !chocolatecakes@cookies.com.
The point is you can follow federated communities from any server. Not that those communities are "shared" by several instances. What you're talking about isn't federated, it's merging. Does mastodon let you merge users across instances?
precisely, so a !main@startrek.com community makes very little sense for how communities are integrated through federation, a !startrek@mywebsite.com makes a lot more sense, but when there is a !startrek@mywebsite.com and a !startrek@yourwebsite.com you've fractured the community if both lemmy servers are federated. a !tng@mywebsite.com and a !ds9@yourwebsite.com makes more sense. you can't really compare it to how mastodon as it's an entirely different type of community platform.
Both use the same protocol, and Lemmy communities are ActivityPub actors just like Mastodon users are. We could do something so !startrek@mywebsite.com would share posts from !startrek@yourwebsite.com, but the way Apub works, they will always be separate.
that sounds like a good way to avoid fracturing communities but how would it work in ways of moderation?
I dont think its a good idea. Moderation would be completely separate for both of these communities. It would probably be possible to make this work as people in this thread imagine, but it would be a lot of work for very little benefit. We have way more useful things to work on.
bridging fractured communities as a community platform is not important?