this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2021
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Meta-community definition
You also cant add it to a meta-community, "the content" that is added is community links, not posts. Remember, that's the main difference between meta-community and community. When you want to post something that isn't a new community, you don't post to the meta-community, you post to a community.
If you just make a community where every post is a link to a community (which in theory you can even do right now without any code changes, as long as you moderate it to be so), then conceptually you have already the data model of a meta-community. And doing this does not necessarily stop you from having moderation, comments, and everythign a community has (because it is a community, just one where each post references a community).
But of course to make it useful as a feed, you need to add a new interface where you can see an aggregate of the posts of the communities referenced (because the posts of the meta-community would be just references to communities). And a way for users to subscribe to that aggregate instead of (or in addition to?) the aggregate of references to communities.
However, this last thing is just a different "view". Meta-community mods do not actively "manage" the posts/comments in that view (because it's not posts/comments from their community), they only manage the posts/comments in their (meta)community (in which posts happen to be references to communities whose posts show in that "view").
Multireddits are just a particular case of "meta-community" (one that does not allow user submissions or comments and has only one admin who submits/deletes entries, which is fine since the thing that makes it worth it is the aggregation of subreddits).
We are still discussing semantics on a particular made-up definition involving small details that don't necessarily matter that much, imho. I don't think we are going anywhere.
Federation
Well yes, but that's not related to instance whitelisting, plus it's a restriction totally valid.
Instances should not be forced to host content they don't want to host. Imagine if a community is about sharing ilegal content (copyright-infringing stuff, child pornography, etc.) the instance could be held responsible if it knowingly hosts that content publicly and does not delete it, even if it was uploaded by other people.
This would be comparable to lemmy.ml accepting/rejecting accounts based on whether the account email is hosted in "gmail.com", "hotmail.com" or whichever other third party service.
It's true that user-instances and community-instances can block each other, but I think it's less likely. I think whitelisting makes sense when instances have to serve or cache content from other instances, something lemmy does in order to federate. But if we stop federating and let clients access multiple instances directly (instead of each user accessing only one instance to access others through federation) then no instance has to serve content from instances that have content they dont want (or content that's ilegal). They'll no longer be responsible for the content from instances they federate with since it's no longer offered through your instance. The user-instances in my example also do not serve content from other instances, so they are also very unlikely to see a need to block anyone.
Also note how the blocking in lemmy is not transitive (if A blocks B but not C, you still can access both A and B through C), this shows they are ok with people going to other instances that migth be more permissive in their allowlist, while still allowing those users to federate with lemmy. I suspect the primary reason for the whitelisting is to avoid actively participating in the distribution of content they don't agree with.
Even if you really want to consider that level of activity (which shouldn't really be significant when we are talking about communities that become centralized nodes on a topic for the entire network). The point was that the number of active topics is limited. Those 2 users can't be active in an infinite amount of topics. At the end of the day the number of active topics is limited by the user engagement. And looking at reddit's numbers, we can see that in a mature social network there's much less active topics than active users (over a thousand times less!).
Remember the reason we talked about this: if you don't duplicate communities then the fact that the amount of popular active topics is limited can lead to huge centralized nodes forming around the active communities.
Sure, but I never said lemmy.ml is the only instance that has active communities. I'm saying it's where most of them are.
Ok so you do mean to incluse user submissions and comments, thanks ! That was not clear to me.
Now, if the idea is really to base the meta on a community, how is its list of communities established? I see two sensible options :
The admin can (un)pins posts, the links of the pinned post make up the list.
A upvote threshold decides which links are on the list. That way it's really community driven.
Great! ...but just in case there's a misunderstanding: remember submissions in a meta-community are communities. We are not talking about posts with links/articles. In the same way, comments in a meta-community would be comments in relation to that submission (the submission linking a community, not a submission linking an url/article).
Each posted link/article from a submitted community in the metacommunity already has its own comment thread, which is independent of the meta-community existance and is already in the community the posted link/article belongs to. As discussed before, meta-communities have no authority over that.
I don't necessarily think meta-communities need to allow user submissions (which would be communities) or comments (which would be on community submissions) to be useful. That's why I didn't see much point in discussing in this direction.
I just pointed out that they can have it (because you asked for it before).
Personally I think it should be possible to customize in each community which users are allowed to post/comment (if at all). I believe "private" communities is a planned feature too.
I feel we are still not understanding each other.
Note that one thing is "the submissions of the meta-community" (which each will be a reference to a community) and a different thing is "the submissions of the communities that are submitted to the meta-community" (which before I called "posts".. or to be more specific: urls/articles).
The former is moderated by the admins/mods in the meta-community. The latter is moderated by the admins/mods in the respective communities where the posts reside.
I imagine there would be 2 "views". One that shows the list of communities in the meta-community (and optionally allows users to submit a new community and comment on those submissions) and another that shows the aggregated posts of the communities that have been submitted to the meta-community.
For this latter "aggregated view of the submissions of the submitted communities", if you wanted to add additional control on what shows there then I guess you could have ways to add "weights" to each community. Maybe, for example, a combination of the number of upvotes to the meta-community submission for that community and the number of upvotes to the submission in the community submitted could be used to decide the order in which the posts show in the aggregate. You could also factor in things like number of subscribers if needed... that kind of detail on how urls/articles are aggregated is something that would require some experimentation to get right.
I think I pretty much inderstand you now. The point of my 2-item list was to draw a line between "communities submitted to the meta community" (which I also referred to as post in that part), and the ones who are actually part of the meta. I was thinking "cutoff" rather than "weight for appearance in the feed", but the latter is also interesting !