We should implement this as whenever I wish to browse (for example) technology@lemmy.world I have to go to there, and whenever I wish to browse technology@kbin.social I have to go there. Would it be possible to implement it in kbin/lemmy’s code to make it easier to browse all?
Another kink to think about is what if you have different communities with the same name on different servers with completely different content. Like what if the trees subreddit came to a server and created a marijuana themed community called trees, but then another server wanted to discuss actual trees so they called theirs trees too. Wouldn’t want those two being grouped together automatically.
This is a good point. Maybe communities could have tags or something so people can browse multiple communies based on a particular theme or interest.
Well… there we go :)
And/ or moderators could have setting to automagically display threads from selected communities. Similar to how #tags currently work with the microblog part of kbin.
Looks like a great project. Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately I use /kbin :(
That would work with kbin magazines too as they are converted to
/c/community.tldon Lemmy side.Great news!
Didn’t plebbit suffer from the same issue in the beginning? As far as I remember it kind of self-resolved itself back then an people migrating from /whatever to /thisIsTheBiggerWhatever.
I guess it could be handy to encourage mods to keep an eye on it and at some point have their community vote\decide if they want to “merge” or something.
Let the competition in the marketplace thrive. Whoever is the stronger opponent will survive.
I just don’t think this is a problem which needs to be solved. On Reddit it’s common to have different subreddits focussed on the same topic. For example, r/Games and r/Gaming. The only difference on Lemmy is that they’re now m/Games@lemmy.world and m/Games@kbin.social. Yeah, it’s slightly longer, but super easy to solve using UX tweaks in the front end.
What’s more, this proliferation of communities across instances is critical for a reasonable user experience because of the apparent widespread support for defederating from instances which aren’t ideologically aligned. If people get comfortable with using one uber gaming community on one instance, that instance could disappear from one day to the next because of a capricious instance owner.
Use the full name and learn to live with it
So subscribe to half a dozen technology@… subs? I guess we can but surely in the long term there is a better way to merge the content of identically named subs so you subscribe to 1 and get the content of all of the others? If the fediverse is going to thrive and expand they need to fix it for the average user who doesn’t understand how all this works. Tags would be the best way, to automate it.
Identically named does not imply identical. Could be totally different communities with the same name. Or there could be subtle but important differences.
Likewise differently named does not imply that two communities are not essentially the same.
Having some form of grouping could be an idea that might be useful to some. I imagine different people would like it to function in different ways.
But it is entirely orthogonal to naming. At the end of the day abc@instance1 is a different name than abc@instance2.
Wasn’t there a forthcoming tag-based feature to allow posts to propagate more easily between similar communities/magazines?
That makes the most sense to me, because then each parallel community also serves like a pseudo-snapshot of the others allowing it to continue without the pain of an interregnum, e.g., in the event of, say, a rogue defederation.
That wouldn’t account for cultural differences between instances though. Where those are drastic, then people should get to choose which one they want to join.
KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.
The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.
Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.
Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.
Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.
The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).
The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.
I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.
This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.
can each kbin/lemmy/etc. also query the upvotes/boosts/likes from all instances and combine them to create ranking(s) of posts that represent the interactions from the whole user base?
I feel like this is a big thing that Lemmy needs quite soon. Lemmy system makes things more fragmented than in reddit for instance, so it would be great to combat this a bit. Sooner rather than later.
Something like when you go to a community there would be a checkmark that would also include posts from a list of communities curated by the mods of the community (or creator). Then when subscribing you would have this list of communities with checkmarks next to them to and being asked “want to sub to these communities as well?” and the user can un-tick some if they want to. Then later they can add their own communities to it should they choose to.
That sounds like too much work.
Just copy reddits multireddit and let users define their own groups.
