For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
There is an issue open on Lemmy’s github about merging communities of the same name together in the ui by an “all” button, but sadly it’s been inactive for a year: #1113
That’s more a feature for a client app.
I mean, people do use the Web UI.
There’s more than one web UI.
I’m not in a rush to endorse client apps adding large, experience changing features. That will radically alter the way different users interact with the service, they might need two apps to get all the features they want, etc
Sounds like a good way to make things even MORE confusing for new users.
I’ve been on Lemmy for a while and still find the duplicate named communities on different insurances confusing. The number of users only somewhat. There are lots of communities still listed from dead instances like feddit.de.
Unique names for communities would be helpful and also support moving a community to a new instance.
Community names are unique if you account for the instance name.
This is a bit confusing as usernames follow a similar, email-address-like format.
I would enjoy there being just one community for a given topic that spans all instances, and moderators can either take actions that are instance specific or “global” (happen everywhere) but again that can get complicated fast. Who gets that global power? What if there are disagreements? Can an instance revoke a global action for just their instance? How much extra work does that create? How do instances handle backend storage for stuff like that (do you want CP deleted globally? I’d imagine so because it’s illegal to store it. Who decides to block an instance out of a community for posting offensive/illegal content; and how do you prevent all that from being abused for non-offensive content that instance mods find disagreeable?)
I wonder how moderating would work in a merged community, would mods not from instance X only be able to hide a post from that instance from the merged community, or would they have power to remove a post from another instance? I’d imagine that is one of the hiccups of a feature like this, it is a shame it has been collecting dust though
Edit: re-read the issue, now I understand it would be more of a multi Reddit than a merged community, so mods would only have the power for their own instance/community it sounds like