Lemmy

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nutomic@lemmy.ml

How would you feel about having the ability to merge communities across instances? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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So let's take this actual example: There's !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.

How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance's community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I'm not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community's home server federates with, with moderator discretion.

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[–] Flelk@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Shit, is this not how Lemmy is intended to work already? I'd assumed this was part of it being "federated." Clearly I have some things to learn.

[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Flelk@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[+] poVoq@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Flelk@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml.

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.

What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms.

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.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sibachian@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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?

[–] sibachian@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sibachian@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

that sounds like a good way to avoid fracturing communities but how would it work in ways of moderation?

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sibachian@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago

bridging fractured communities as a community platform is not important?

[–] zksmk@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

The simplest way to allow users to merge communities like this as they please, as opposed to having the moderators choose for them what communities will merge or having the communities auto-merge, or adding the topic umbrella over communities (which I think is an interesting idea), is to allow ”multi-communities” (like multireddits), so https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek+startrek@lemmygrad_ml+startrek@mywebsite_com would display all the community's posts on one page.

Edit: To expand on how I see @Gwynne@lemmy.ml 's topic umbrella idea, each community would have a mandatory topic (not category, those already exist), that would by default be the same as the community's name (but could be edited), and going to https://instance.tld/t/startrek would display posts from all the startrek communities on all instances.

I understand this is an advanced federation feature, so I don't expect it made soon, I'm sure the devs have their hands full already, just an idea.