There was some proposal that I have seen multiple times on Lemmy and at least once on the GitHub repo that communities should be able to subscribe to each other much like users can subscribe to communities. I vastly prefer this to other proposals such as auto-merging communities with the same name, which I can think of a few ways that can go wrong.
It would also be reasonably intuitive for the average user, since following stuff is already a familiar action you take on social media. You wouldn’t really need to understand the quirks of federation to know why posting to one community makes it appear on other downstream communities. And as far as I know about ActivityPub (which is admittedly not much), it’s not a stretch use it to implement a feature like this.
I wonder if this proposal ever reached anywhere.
The idea that I’m talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I’d like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don’t also follow them independently.
This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.
The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn’t achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.
A better proposal in my eyes would be a “improved cross-post”. Currently crossposts are just posts that link to the other post, thus making two separate conversations and double the spam for people.
My proposal would be for a crosspost to act like a true link to the original, where people wouldn’t see them as two independent psots but the cross posting would just expand the amount of people that sees the original. Users that click on the cross posted post are directed to the instance it was originally posted, and the conversations are kept simple.
I guess that to implement this we would need to change how a post appears to people, it would in a way look like a post from community A that shows in community B, but the ID of the post is the same so it shows up once in feeds. Dunno.
Yeah let’s just centralize all of this bullshit.
/s
One main community greater than others with the same topic on a decetralized platform ≠ centralization.
To be fair, it is one form of centralization; although, I admit, I was twisting the meaning of the term a bit to fit my sarcastic remark.
That being said, as primarily a shitposting lurker who only occasionally actually creates content designed for sharing, I don’t mind the extra communities. I’m no stranger to seeing reposts, and I get my kicks from leaving the odd comment that may or may not spawn some sort of rant (usually from myself, not the other parties), but hopefully just tickles someone, and then scrolling to the next. If it’s the same thing, I just keep scrollin’.
I could see how it would be irritating to post to multiple communities designed around the same idea, but perhaps the solution is more like turning each community into an aggregate of all similar communities. You could opt your community into a master community, and any post made in one would get shared to all of them.
I mean I would still like to get rid of the same meme being posted 5 times in 2h…
Ye
Centralize the output but it’s only replicated across each imstance.
Yeah we eventually got to that in the other comments. It was a whole thing
Just chiming in to throw some light hearted shade at lemmy.world for defederating from the piracy communities. My time on lemmy.world was really poor, and I came away not thinking too highly of Lemmy as a whole. My experience in different instances has been a world of difference, and I finally get fantastic content in my feeds and am fully on board with Lemmy
Yep, their defederation from piracy comms and moderation of Luigi-related politics are my two biggest gripes with the instance administration itself.
Which instance are you using? I’ve been using world since start, but open to others. Never really looked into it too much.
I’m on lemm.ee! It seems to have a good balance of users and sensible defederation. On mobile, the app you use make a world of a difference too. Both Jerboa and Thunder (Android) were mid tier experiences, but now I’m using Boost and it’s phenomenal!
EE is nice. They won’t defederate with just about anyone. But so far the mod assholery has been minimal.
Removed by mod
Again something the mods have to talk about. It’s something the mods have to discuss about (the community can take part in that discussion too, democracy and stuff). We could for example merge to lemmy.ml.
Removed by mod
I’m scared
Funny but not surprising that my comment got deleted and the one that says the same thing about .world not. They couldn’t prove my point better
but lemmy.ml users are by far funnier and more based
It didn’t used to be like this. Maybe take it up with the brave patriot who’s made it his sacred duty to repost ml memes to world, in the hopes of convincing the world admins to defederate from ml. https://lemmy.world/comment/15251475
critical support to that lone soldier, I hope he succeeds in his mission, I would love to never see another .world post
Oh no, whatever will all the rest of us do without chronic reposters who are allergic to reading articles?
I agree and I think we should merge instances too, and maybe appoint a CEO to take care of it. we can call it lemmit.
I can be the CEO if I get 30 million euros a year.
I blocked .world because it’s a centrist shit hole that serves to do nothing but piss me off with whiners who don’t do shit about fuck complaining about tankies and fascists as though their no side taking ass even has a fucking seat at the table.
Fuck .world
Removed by mod
Oh look holocaust trivialization
Ok, that needs a little explaination
Cowbee already answered your question but I’d like to point out that as a German you really need to be careful about what propaganda you believe about the Soviet Union and Stalin. Keep in mind that Germans killed 26 million soviet citizens less than a hundred years ago.
First they came for the tankies, and I said good fuck em that’s between y’all
no, because not everyone likes to join lemmy.world because of the fedipact.
You don’t have to join an instance to participate in their community.
We could find a solution for that, couldn’t we?
E: It’s something the mods have to discuss about (the community can take part in that discussion too, democracy and stuff). We could for example merge to lemmy.ml.
To be fair, one can have good reasons against .ml as well as .world
Having two communities is not the worst idea imho
Based
To be fair, one can have good reasons against .ml as well as .world
You’re right now let’s start our own com on a completely different instance. /s
I think it would be cool if something like “meta-communities” existed. Fully adjustable, fully optional. Less duplicates.
You’d sub to one meta c/memes or c/news and see a combined feed of all known instance’s versions. Post to whichever you want, show up in the meta (if you want).
If you still want to block from the meta sub or individually sub to c/memes on ABC instance, you could do that. Moderation would be subject to the instance the user posted on, subject to broader instance admin’s defederations and stuff.
Idk just a quick idea. Decentralization is good, but a little bit of… aggregation like this could go a long way without actually centralizing power. Could help communities (big and small niche) to grow.
I’ve been saying this over a year ago:
https://lemmy.world/comment/708523
This why lemmy and federation instances are so missing and empty. We don’t even have the option to make custom subscription lists or I’d have manually done that. It’s so badly needed
So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.
You have five communities covering the same topic. There’s, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They’re all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.
What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?
They treat it as if they’re all one community. As if they’re all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they’re met with the consequences of this).
Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community’s posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that’s easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they’re interchangeable, but as if they’re all one.
This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.
We don’t need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.
Those are actually all really good points. Nevermind about my idea then…
Sounds like a whole app idea.
Isn’t RSS what you’re describing?
deleted by creator
There should be a way to see the content from different communities with the same name but from different instances in the same page, like some sort of automatic multireddit. The content would probably be limited to instances federated with your home instance but even then it’s something I would like to have.
You cannot assume that communities with the same name are meant to be on the same topic.
Say I set up an instance focused on discussing parties at home. There are fun in-person games you can play with your friends when many of you are over, so I would create a community c/games for discussing them. Now, what if I want my instance to federate with lemmy.world? They already have a c/games that is dedicated to videogames. Maybe I also would need a community dedicated to videogames, but I’d have to call it c/videogames, because I already have a c/games.
Some human intervention would be required to let the network know that the local c/videogames is the one that has to federate with lemmy.world’s c/games, and not the local c/games.
Maybe an automatic suggestion would be fine as a starting point, but it would be more useful that communities themselves could explicitly establish which remote communities they are associated with, without depending on the names.
That’s actually a pretty idea. I’m imaging something like a tool included into lemmy where you can collect different subs into one folder and even share these/export those folders as xml or json to a new account… And now we’re talking about RSS-feeds. Basically.
But RSS-feeds included into lemmy. I don’t really know if that would help to get rid of reposts, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. Something one would have to integrate in an Lemmy update, so you would need to contribute to the Lemmy code.
I actually love this idea. I’m on a federated service, why do I need to go to 3 meme communities on 3 instances when I could go to “meme” and see all of them?
Crossposts from within the cross-feed could be automatically hidden to avoid showing the same post multiple times, and then we just start spreading the word to crosspost instead of reposting. I think the only issue is that this would definitely be better to implement client-side because AP is just a protocol to move data, whereas this requires checking too many user-defined variables to make it idiomatic easily. I could be wrong though, I don’t know the AP code very well
my man has no idea on the motivation behind federation
It’s still federated.
the motivation behind federation
They are just trying to say that you don’t want all your eggs in one basket. In my opinion it’s better to have it posted once on either and it shows up in my list. The logic is that if everyone posts on 1 instance, that instance ends up having more power over other instances. For instance it can defederate with another instance and since all the content is on theirs those users would be forced to start over, or join the bigger instance and abide by their rules. Slowly you end up back in a situation like reddit. Where maybe they put ads in, and you have to choose ads and active number of users, or no ads and very little content starting fresh. Spreading out content helps combat enshitification if you will.
Yes, but on which instance? Lemmy.ml is not controversy free and Lemmy.world already hosts like 50% of Lemmy alone. I think the only viable option that everyone could agree on would be another instance, but that would just leave us with 3 communities.
I think the only viable option that everyone could agree on would be another instance, but that would just leave us with 3 communities.
Relevant XKCD:
Exactly. Instead why don’t let grow MORE NICHE communities with specific kind of memes on smaller instances?
The larger communities are easier to find and have more subscribers, people can post to one of the smaller ones, but very few people will see it.
Quick! Someone crosspost this to !memes@lemmy.world
no
Thanks for this detailed reasoning.
ok
