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 !

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.

That's true if nothing is expected from the user-instance side. But for example a community-instance may expect from the federated user-instances that they ban user who are repetedly reported for bad behaviour.

This will be all the more true when Lemmy will federate with other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. There, there is a public user to user interaction and so it may be desirable to block the instances that allows undesired behaviours, because most users from there will make no difference and act the same way on Lemmy communities.

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.

They serve content from the community instances to their users, whether they host it or not.

If you really want those instances to disappear altogether and the user accessing communities from client, we lose the feature of user-instances blocking users for all their members, and the members will have to block e.g. all nazis one by one.

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.

They can form, true, but they can also stop growing at some point, as a result of either their own will, the new communities being created elsewhere or cpmmunities migrating elsewhere. In fact, shared communities also don't prevent these instances to become bigger and bigger.

Those 2 users can't be active in an infinite amount of topics.

Of course I didn't mean that litterally an infinity of communities will exist some day, just that there are way more topics than what is currently on lemmy.ml so there is a lot of room for other instances to grow.

Also, the limit of topic that they can discuss simultaneously is not the same as the global one, considering that new communities (dis)appear everyday. And sometimes one will create a new community instead of one that is dying, e.g. setting new rules that they think will improve it. Maybe creating a community on a new instance with different CoC.

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).

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 :

1. The admin can (un)pins posts, the links of the pinned post make up the list.

2. A upvote threshold decides which links are on the list. That way it's really community driven.

Meta-communities

The fact that you later acknowledge that a meta-community can have community-like features shows you understand what I meant.

Sorry, but I am still trying. What you first said is that a multireddit can be seen as a meta-community, which I didn't understand because the only similarity I see (between multi and community) is that there is somehow a list involved. Were you really talking about multireddits or are you building a concept of metacommunity around it but more similar to a community in some way ? (justifying the comparison)

I expect the only ones who add/remove communities to a metacommunity are already the admins/moderators.

So the way the content is added is the one of a multireddit, not a community.

the one limit that meta-community imposes is that all posts should be links to communities

And so is the content.

So to me it seems that your concept of metacommunity is identical to the one of multireddit rather than something you are making up. Please correct me if that's wrong and explain how it's different, that's exactly the thing I'm trying to understand with this discussion.

The link posted (if it has it) does not disappear from the internet. The data attached to the post does

So, if what I said above is correct, what you are doing is stripping a post of its body, title, community, comments down to a link, so that the community (now a mere list of links) can fit the comparison with a multireddit.

Federation

As mentioned before, you can do this without federating between instances.

You need to federate the instances where the users are. Now Lemmy has only one kind of instance, for both communities and users. You propose a model where there are two (user-instance and community-instance), that's interesting.

does not have the problems of instances needing whitelisting to prevent caching/hosting content they don't want.

Community-instances would still be able to accept or reject the communities that they host, and that is not really about federation.

On the other hand, user-instances and community-instances would still be able to accept or reject each other.

I said "useful/used". So you could also say "used" (ie.. people actually use it, it's not abandoned). And in a sentence after that I used also the term "active".

Ok but communities about any kind of niche topic can be active, all you need is at least 2 users ready to publicly and regularly communicate with each other. In particular, being active does not require thousands of users, so is not bound to the big topics who already have pages on lemmy.ml.

I meant they manage communities in the same way communities manage posts.

But they don't. A community contains post who are written for the community by its users. If a community refuses a post, it basically doesn't exist. A meta-community refers to communities who exist independently from it.

Sure, one can imagine giving community-like features to a meta or vice versa to create an hybrid of the two, but the two things are just very different to start with.

That’s how migration in centralized networks work. If that’s the intended approach I don’t see what’s the benefit of federating server-to-server.

The difference is that the users don't need to register on the instance where the community is going. All the instances that federate with each other share a pool of users that can register to any of their communities.

You were complaining that leemy.ml will never stop to be a central place if its communities don't share content with other instances, but communities could simply migrate from it to other instances.

You are not benefiting from federation if communities are meant to be centralized.

The communities are not the only actors on the instances: federation allows local users to interact with remote users and communities. That each community is centralized doesn't mean the whole network is.

Enough to be actually useful/used.

Define "actually useful". An instance with 2 users who post once a year to wish each other a happy christmas is useful for them. Federation allows everyone to create their own niche community on their own instance. Even if none of them ever reaches a thousand of users, the mere possibly is already an accomplished goal of the federation justifying its existence.

so in the end there’s always a limit in the number of useful topics, and this limit is relative to the amount of users, their engagement and diversity.

Do you thing lemmy.ml already has all of them?

Multireddit-like meta-community

I said a meta-community manages communities while a community manages posts. That's all the sense I meant.

And I said "manages" doesn't mean the same as a community is more than a list of post (so its management includes moderation), while a multireddit is a list of subs. You then referred to the meta-communities as a form of authority, as if the communities were grouped under a centralised authority who actually had some power over the federated commus; which is why I thought it would be appropriate to insist that it is not the case.

That's fine. It's honestly not a strong enough influence

I agree. That was meant as an anticipation to a counterpoint, which I thinl it is now clear that you wouldn't have tried to make. Sorry about the generated confusion.

Smaller instances

That's the problem. That's why I doubt we'll ever see lemmy.ml stop being the main instance.

Note that I was only talking about two simultaneously existing communities with exactly the same topic and CoC. This does not prevent a community from migrating, by which I mean the old one blocking new post submissions and linking to the new one in a pinned post and/or sidebar.

There's a limited amount of topics that are interesting enough to gather a big enough audience.

To gather an audience big enough for what? There is an infinite amount of topics, and there are also several communities that can be constructed around the same topic (with different CoC, or focusing on different aspects, media,...)

a community adds/removes posts to its aggregate.

Moderation is a separate topic.

Community/subreddit admins can moderate the comment sections of their posts, and hence manage more than just the list of posts. Multireddit creators only manage the list of subs. So no, a multireddit cannot be seen as meta-communities in the sense that you mentioned.

A multireddit never has any control over the posts (not even if it had more followers than the communities).

It simply won’t be part of that meta and users subscribed to the meta won’t see those posts as part of it.

The latter is precisely the reason why I was claiming that a popular enough multireddit can have indirect (sorry if that was not clear enough) power over the content of the sub. The same way that even if you can publish FOSS android apps out of F-Droid, it is interesting to comply to F-Droid's rules so that your app is published there, because F-Droid is significantly more popular than your app is.

Anyway, this little comment was me trying to anticipate this exception that could be mentioned to the general point I was trying to make : multireddit maintainers usually have no power on the subs' content, unlike the subs with respect to the posts.

The fact that you think that in order to create a community in another instance for the same topic the most probable reason is CoC discrepancy shows that there’s very little incentive to de-centralize the communities.

I don't really understand why one would create a clone community on another instance (call it instance B) if the reason is not to have a different moderation from the original one (instance A).

In fact I do see one reason : to allow people from an instance (C) that does not whitelist instance A to join the meta-community. In that case, the obvious solution is to allow instance C to whitelist the community without whitelist the full instance A (e.g. because it trusts the community mods but not the instance admins).

Hope that makes sense, as I don't really know how whitelisting currently works, i.e. whether the instance has power on

1. on which instances its users can follow a community (that's the one I assumed)

2. users from which instances can join its communities

3. both (1) and (2) from a single list

4. (1) and (2) separately (that would be ideal I think)

I don’t see how lemmy.ml will stop being the central community node if that doesn’t change.

If the new communities are created on other instances. I don't really see the need for duplicating the existing communities.

The whitelisting (or allowlisting) itself is playing against the idea of federation.

If you mean whitelist vs blacklist, I agree ! But I don't think any of our points rely on that distinction. Do you think they do?

A conclusive remark : if all you meant with this meta-community thing is a multireddit-like aggregate for similar communities, I agree it would be nice. If you actually mean merging two similar communities with a result that keeps living on both instances, I'm still not sure I see either the how or the why you would do that.

I don't have any idea about whether it already works that ways, or about how hard it would be to implement that.

I just read in another comment that there is an issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1576

a community that instead of managing an aggregate of post manages an aggregate of communities

I don't agree : "managing" doesn't mean the same thing. AFAIU, there's nothing more to managing a multireddit than updating the list of subs it contains. Managing a community (or a sub) includes moderating the content. The only way for a multireddit maintainer to have any control is that the multireddit be more followed than the subs it contains, so that being part of the multireddit is in the sub's interest.

without having to manually keep track of each instance

I don't think one has to manually keep track of the instances. One can subscribe to a community on another instance, follow the updates in their subscribed feed, and comment from their instance.

Ok, if there are two communities on the same topic on two different instances, that's two communities that one has to subscribe to, but that's a one time operation, right? Also if the communities have to be created on two instances, it probably means that they don't share the same code of conduct (CoC). So it does result in two different communities being created, right?

Maybe what you are asking for is that instances being able to whitelist only a community from an instance, e.g. if the community has stricter CoC than the instance? I have don't have any idea about whether it already works that ways, or about how hard it would be to implement that.

I notice these things a lot. Where roads and junctions are expensively over-engineered. They add granite road insets, or fancy paving, or traffic lights where they're not needed, etc.

Ok but we're talking about the public transportation. This is actuallly consistent with the idea that public transportation be underbudgeted in favour of more projects who are directed towards car drivers.

I didn't say "cross instance communities", I said "topics" or "categories" because I don't think it necessarily has to be "communities" what needs to be cross-instance.

What could that be except communities? Hashtags maybe? Or maybe having communities that affiliate with each other, not as a full merge, but providing a mutually agregated feed, something like a multireddit but that would be accessible from the communities' respective pages.

The payout is insufficient to even be able to afford a room.

That probably depends on which program in which country you are talking about. Note that some people may have somewhere to stay, but not enough money to participate in the living expenses.