Lemmy

12715 readers

51 users here now

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So let's take this actual example: There's [email protected] and [email protected]. 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (20 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago (19 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (18 children)

You can add [email protected] 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. This is what federation was always about.

What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms. Federated content is AFAIK already replicated on the connected server, so it seems feasible to implement something like that, but there are probably some details in the ActivityPub specs that make it difficult to do so (for example: I think AP does not allow substituting the sender).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 years ago

the problem here is discoverability! as it stands in all Fediverse projects fewer instances host the majority of the fediverse users. because without being able to discover threads of other instances from the one you signed-up to, those smaller communities will not be active enough and will end up duying.
We must think of ways of merging the feed form different communities of different instances so the user feels like interacting with one big universe rather than separate communities.

load more comments (17 replies)