Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
Communities stand on their own, they have their own moderators, followers, posts, etc, and there's no way to merge them as entities. Activitypub-wise it makes as much sense a merging two users.
The main way to accomplish what you're talking about, is just to close one community and recommend people use the other one.
Well, this suggestion isn't really merging, more auto-subscribing to similar communities when you subscribe to one, as recommended by the mods of the community you subscribed to. It solves the fragmentation problem where popular topics have lots of independent communities on different instances.
so like, not merging them. but putting all of those community under one category? actually, this seems like a great idea. the option like would replace the centralized reddit community, to sub-communities from different instances.@[email protected]
how I would do this is first make a list of similar/same type of communities. keep the communities seperate but putting them all under one topic. and by default you view everything from that topic until you decide to click one specific community from an instance.
I think there will be some cases in the future where some sublemmies are basically the same thing in a different instance.
I think this is a needed feature for lemmy's federation to truly shine, but I understand if there is too much things you're working on right now. just a suggestion @[email protected]
I don't think it's a good idea to auto subscribe ppl to communities they haven't explicitly wanted to. I think the best would be for sidebars to link other communities.
Hmm, yes some sort of popup with checkboxes to auto-subscribe to similar communities on other servers as recommended by the moderators would be a nice addition.
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 @[email protected] '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.
They are really cool ideas. A like most the fist one, as this makes more clear that there are more than one community, and as @[email protected] points, communities have their own bylaws and people. And, users can use it to aggregate arbitrary communities, lets say, unifying all Sci-Fi instead of only Star Trek.
having read through all the discussion below I think some nicely exposed multilemmy type functionality would let people achieve what they want.
I've only just found multireddits myself and really love the way I can pull together various feeds that work for me.
Yes, I feel this is how federation should work ideally. As long as it's not automatic and is only for select communities, there should be few moderation concerns.
I was just wondering the other day if this was how federation here already worked or not. It seems to make the most sense for how most pople would probably be using lemmy, and I imagine it would make the fediverse a bit more accessible
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.
I too had presumed that there was going to be a way to federate communities across instances into one feed, based on the mutual agreement of course.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Why would [email protected] be synced in any way with [email protected] ? 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.
Why would [email protected] be synced in any way with [email protected]
Interesting, I hadn't contemplated the idea of topic-dedicated servers. So looking at multiple servers through lemmy.ml is functionally equivalent to using a local client to pull the data from each server separately. I don't think that's a bad idea, it's just not what I'd assumed.
As I said in my initial post, clearly I have some things to learn! I'm not a programmer, just a superuser with an interest in finding an alternative to Reddit's increasingly invasive and restrictive platform.
That said, I do still like the idea of giving subs the option to "merge" if so desired. It's an interesting layer of complexity to add on top of what I'm realizing is already a fairly complex system.
Small nit: it's not like pulling data from each server separately because you can have one user account on one server and vote / comment / post in communities on all the servers using that one same identity.
So what's the role of the server in account creation/maintenance? Others could take the name "Flelk" on other servers and parade around pretending to be me, meaning readers have to check the domain name to confirm whether it really is me? If my "home" server deletes my account, does that erase all my votes, comments, and posts on just my "home" server, or on all servers?
(I know you folks are busy actually building this thing, so if there are better ways to get answers to these questions other than asking you admins directly, please feel free to point me in that direction.)
The domain name pretty much is a part of your username, just like it is a part of an email address. Impersonation is unlikely as your name is displayed as @[email protected] whenever your comments or posts are viewed from another instance. Your bigger concern for impersonation is somebody using lower case L instead of uppercase i and stuff like that (I and l, can you see the difference?)
(Unless you choose to have a display name, that's for some reason the same on all instances. I assume even on the same instance there can be multiple users with the same display name. Not sure why people use it tho, it could easily get confusing)
This is how your account looks from lemmy.ca for example.
As far as I'm aware, if you delete your account it only gets deleted from your home instance. A removal request gets sent to other instances, they could in theory refuse it. I'm not sure what data the other instances store and for how long tho. I think your public stuff like comments and posts etc gets stored?
Now that's interesting, only my posts in [email protected] are visible on lemmy.ca. My first post to [email protected] and my post in [email protected] don't show up at all. Do those other communities not sync to lemmy.ca? What's going on there?
Your own server is the one through which you interact with all others. You just talk to it, and then it talks to the other servers.
Yup, the domain name is part of what defines your identity. I would expect that eventually we'll have more interface options to ensure it's not too confusing who's who (especially since there's your real username and then you can also set a display name) but it's one of those things that isn't really a problem until it's a problem.
Deletions in the fediverse have been a big deal in past. The tl;dr is that your "home" server would send out a "hey delete this" notification to all the other servers. By default they will of course do that, but you can see that it's conceivable that someone could make a malicious version of server software that wouldn't.
I am not a dev on the project so I am happy to pitch in answering Qs. :)
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 [email protected], [email protected] 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 [email protected].
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 [email protected] community makes very little sense for how communities are integrated through federation, a [email protected] makes a lot more sense, but when there is a [email protected] and a [email protected] you've fractured the community if both lemmy servers are federated. a [email protected] and a [email protected] 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 [email protected] would share posts from [email protected], 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?
Not as important as moderation tools, or language tagging for posts/comments.
i'll concede to that :)
I was hoping we would have the ability to follow other instance's feeds with one account like how you subscribe to a subreddit on reddit. Like if someone made a lemmy instance all about photography then I could follow that feed instead of having to create an account on their instance, then follow an instance all about keyboards or cars etc. I think that would be the best way to decentralize the content instead of all being on one instance with multiple mini communities. Some times I follow multiple subreddits about the same thing because they have a slightly different focus so I dont think merging them would be the best option but being able to subscribe to one or the other or both would be nice
That is how the federation currently works.
I could follow that feed instead of having to create an account on their instance,
You already sort of can do that, you just need to manually subscribe to each individual community you want to follow on that instance. Just in case it's not clear, you can subscribe to and read and comment in other instances' communities from here, your home instance, with one account.
oh wow! ok never mind then haha I used mastodon before and I remembered you could follow a user but not the entire instance
I used to be really enthusiastic about the idea of hashtags being used to branch communities here together, but I don't think @[email protected] was as enthusiastic as I was.
Eventually, I realized that it was better to just stop pestering them about which features I most wanted to see.