The issue I've noticed first and foremost is that there is more than one identically named group. Don't tell me that rpg@kbin.social, rpg@lemmy.ml, and rpg@foo.bar are different communities. They're identically named communities.
Since lemmy terms a "community" as the same thing as a kbin magazine, but community can also have a more expansive meaning, for clarity I will refer to lemmy magazines and use community in it's more expansive scope.
rpg@foo.bar isn't a real thing obviously but is your standing for an rpg magazine on any other instance.
rpg@lemmy.ml and rpg@kbin.social appear to be two separate magazines, hosted on two difference instances, and owned and moderated by two separate groups of people, but about the same topic - role playing games. If you ignore the instance part of the name, then they have identical names - which makes sense because they cover the same topic.
There is a UX issue on kbin where the instance part of the name is hidden, but there are also kbin styles that fix this.
Getting fixated on the identical name part is getting hung up over a minor technicality. Remember that reddit has a similar issue with very similarly named subs, where you might have /r/X and then /r/TrueX and /r/XOriginal - something that was encouraged by reddit's own policy, where instead of getting involved with a mod of a sub they would just encourage you to make your own sub.
I'd rather have as false positive of a gun user's instance with threads about rocket-propelled grenades, rather than having to go to each group to browse
I think this is legitimate. This was solved on reddit with multireddits but kbin doesn't have an equivalent yet.
If devs and leaders of the ActivityPub community are going to continue pushing the idea that everyone can talk to everyone else, we absolutely need some form of community merging for identically-named communities. For instance, a kbin.social user should be able to subscribe to cooking and see posts from cooking@. , not just cooking@kbin.social. That's a UX issue just as much as a technical one.
Good point. Even if kbin/lemmy don't support it, maybe we can get multimagazines working first at say an app level (like in Artemis).
Don't tell me to just use the "subscribed" view. That doesn't pick up everything in a topic, nor does it help me to find those - again, identically named - communities on other servers.
I wouldn't as that's not what that view is for. You want to view a multimagazine that covers a given topic like rpg rather than see your own subscriptions.
Whenever a new server comes online with an RPG community, they'll be in their own corner.
They can participate as foreigners with another group, but that's not theirs.
They can go as far as to mod magazines in another instance. How are they thus foreigners? This is the point of federation - that equal standing to view, post, contribute, moderate, etc across instances.
If there was a server set up just to host groups, and the rest were for users, that would make sense.
From a centralized, non-federated point of view.
There's no central place for hosting these communities.
Because there is no need for that. I'd point to the example of r/blind - they continue to maintain their sub on reddit but officially the community is also available on their own lemmy instance as well as through their own website. One community, but not centralized anywhere.
I did that back in the day, joining forums and setting up a personal homepage with frames. In theory anyone can join any group, but they have to find it first.
With federation, you don't have to go that far. Communicating across instances works automatically and you only need one account to do so, as opposed to creating a new account on each forum.
I immediately grew tired, trying to find all of the communities related to my interests so I can subscribe to all.
I'd recommend you check out some of the older posts on @RedditMIgration as there are lots of links to community (not magazine but community in the broader sense) run websites that try to solve this by listing all of the magazines on instances.
This is probably simpler and more fruitful than searching manually.