Is there a way to create Super Communities?

I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.

A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?

B: I think this is the best solution, could a 'super community' method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?

roastpotatothief, (edited )

Any update on this?

I couldn’t find any comment from the devs. Was there one?

There is an extra problem, not mentioned here. When there are subs with the same name, it is actually impossible to know of choose which sub I am posting to. Like here.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f906a05c-3e70-408f-8cc2-dda52b434e17.png

honk,

I don't think this is an issue tbh.

The full name of a community includes the instance is running on. For this community here the instance is asklemmy@lemmy.ml . If you are referring to community you should include the instance to avoid confusion.

To the issue of duplicate communities: That issue existed on reddit too. Communities with slight variations in the name always existed. Sometimes the owners of some variation of the community just decided to forward their users to a "main community". Sometimes multiple communities coexist. I believe that in most cases a certain "main community" will establish itself as the one that the majority just accepts as the "real deal" because it has the most activity and the best moderation policies.

CeruleanRuin,

I think you've got it. It's only a problem that exists when communities are first starting. The best version will win out eventually, or a balance will emerge. Sometimes one will end up as a meme- or image-heavy forum, while the other one becomes primarily discussion focused.

courts,
courts avatar

I think just being able in my client to "aggregate" different communities/magazines (I'm writing this from kbin) would be great. Like multireddits. This way, everyone can decide for themselves what smaller communities they want to subscribe to. I think neither Lemmy's clients nor kbin support this right now, unfortunately.

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

So what should be easier now is finding those communities/magazines, maybe on a post of one of these communities with links to the other ones

Syo,
Syo avatar

I think you can subscribe to individual magazines on kbin, then just show your subscribed magazines. This means you still have to subscribe to multiple communities. Eventually, it should settle with better modded ones reaching critical mass after some time. Everything is in flux right now, what you're looking for is better done when communities are stable.

courts,
courts avatar

Yes, that works of course. What I like to do is look at a specific topic when I want to. Let's say, I'm in the mood to only check out literature/book related stuff. I'd like to open my "Multimagazine" (I saw someone call it a rack, which I think is a nice analogy) where I only see posts that belong to this topic.

Syo,
Syo avatar

The only thing that's a bit painful now is finding narrow topics. Reddit had grown so big, you can almost guarantee to look for niche topics. On here, you're better asking /m/random.

In a year or so, if fediverse can grow nicely, maybe we'll be asking top level instance to recommend the best community, and rebuild your niche collection.

DrQuint,

This is what I want. A way for users to create their own "lists" similar to multireddits, which come up on their feeds as part of a super-community, and then they can share that list with other users.

No hassle for the moderators. No change to the system outside of the feature's own self-contained stuff.

nintendiator,

Personally I feel the entire point is it should be done like that. Like it was in the 90s. Every little cats community can be out there and independent from each other; communities, identities and administration can remain separate. For discoverability, rather than make it part of the platform which would eventually induce dark incentives towards the kind of consolidation that happened with Reddit in the first place, well, why not also do it like back in the 90s? There used to be the webdirectories, as well as the webrings (in Yahoo, Geocities, etc) that served as an independent discovery system.

Rentlar,

I was thinking the idea of hashtags at the community and/or post level could be an idea. That way it could aggregate the various communities on instances under one umbrella. E.g. https://lemmy.ml/#gaming could bring up every federated and indexed community tagged gaming. A community such as the pokemon one on lemmy.ml could have tags and in order to appear both at the superset of gaming as well as connect with other pokemon related subs if there was pokemonGo or pokemonTCG.

It would likely require an update of lemmy system itself, I'd have to spend a lot of time with the code to get an idea of how to implement it.

Kris,

This is how it's done on mastodon

VerifiablyMrWonka,
VerifiablyMrWonka avatar

This is something KBin is doing already. Communities can have hashtags attached that show under a communities (magazines) microblog space.

TheTrueCryptid,

True fragmentation seems like it would be a huge issue.

Also allowing easy exporting/migrating between instances should be possible.

From my understanding (having literally discovered lemmy and the fediverse like an hour ago) mastodon supports things like grouping and account migration, so I assume it should be possible with lemmy?

Also I'll be honest I have no idea what mastodon is.

VerifiablyMrWonka,
VerifiablyMrWonka avatar

Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter.

The underlying ActivityPub protocol is pretty flexible. A Mastodon user can subscribe to Lemmy communties and a Lemmy user can follow a Mastodon account. Same goes for KBin which has added functionality in that communites (magazines in KBin) can follow hashtags that Mastodon accounts might use, bringing those posts in as additional community content.

arkcom,
arkcom avatar

I've mentioned this elsewhere but it could just be a UI thing handled by/for each user, that way moderation and control will stay where they are

Basically I could make a group of communities/magazines, for example
selfhosted@kbin.social
selfhost@lemmy.ml
selfhosted@lemmy.world
selfhosting@chirp.social
selfhosted@lemmy.ml
selfhosting@slrpnk.net

For browsing, up/downvoting, and commenting it could be totally transparent. When you want to make your own thread it could just have you select the specific magazine/community from a drop down.

This wouldn't fix the problem of seeing multiple duplicate posts from each.

png,
png avatar

I think this is the ideal solution, but you should be able to share the groups you create with others, exactly like multireddits. That way, collections of these groups could be made available to others, for them to add to their feed.

PhilL,

I think a simple solution to this problem would be to be able to integrate several subscribed communities into a single timeline, similar to Mastodon Lists.

I would call this feature 'Mingling' :)

aqua_synonym,

That's exactly what I thought of. Here's my proposal (though I don't know if this can be implemented in the technology or if it would be compatible with ActivityPub):

Suppose we have two similar communities (i.e., north.pole and north.star, but they both tackle northness but in different instances). The mod from either communities would send an invite to the other to form a "group" or "federate" or "ally". Now, if the other mod approves, here's what happens:

Whenever you post something in a community that has a group, it would be synced with the communities in other instances that are allied to it, including upvotes, comments, and other metrics. So if I post in north.pole, people in north.star could see my post too because we're in an "alliance" and vice versa. They can also upvote my post and I can upvote theirs. There would just be a sign (probably a flair-like design) that would tell users in other instances from which instance the post came from.

With regards to moderation, here's how: they are basically separate communities with content syncing between them. Suppose a user in north.star posts something offensive and against north.pole community rules. The mods in north.pole can block that post from appearing in the north.pole feed.

And here's an unrelated gripe: there should be an instance-standard "ouster poll" for communities that are dead. With what I see right now in the influx of Lemmy users, many communities are dead and users are willing to revive them but they can't because the moderators of those communities are already inactive and redundancy is a pain in "advertising" membership in Lemmy already. There should be like a poll of interested users where they would agree to "oust" the inactive mod (of course there's also a qualification for "inactive") and replace them with probably a democratically "elected" moderator.

tetris11,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

I don't like the idea of a voting system for mods, as it can be gamed very easily by bot accounts. Democracy is sadly under threat due to AI, and so I think the wall-gardened approach might be necessary: users choose an instance of north that suits them, and if the mod is a dick, then those users let the mods of the other north instances (under that super community) know, and the mods of other instances make the decision.

itadakimasu,

Have my upvote. Without such an ability, I fear fragmentation of communities will be a fatal flaw holding back Lemmy's success

Kris,

Isn't that the whole point of Lemmy? So there's no community that's too big to fail?

itadakimasu,

not the whole point, imo

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Ideally you'd want 3-4, but 300.

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

There is no problem if there are more communities with the same topic. The ones wich are better moderated and actively updated will eventually gain in popularity and stand out

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Could potentially be hundreds though, and puts a lot of work on users to look around for the best one -> most likely the communities in bigger instances will win out.

Kichae,

Yeah. There used to be a hundred thousand Dragonball forums out there, and it was never a problem. We should be ok with it not being a problem again.

The fomo over he idea that someone said sornthing somewhere about a thing I care about and I might not be seeing it is one of the worst things big social has given us.

zinklog,

For this to happen every single instance will have to fetch every community from every instance to aggregate posts and make sure new similar community is added which isn't feasible (I think).

Give it some time, and I think organically 1-2 most popular communities will emerge for each specific topic and people will then just subscribe to those ones.

Vildravn,
Vildravn avatar

Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of federation if the communities will live largely on the most popular instances?

ParkingPsychology,

Keep in mind that even on reddit it doesn't work like that. For anything popular you generally end up with 2 or 3 large subs and then a smattering of smaller spin offs/specializations.

So here it's basically the same, except that you end up with several with the exact same name on multiple servers. They don't have to be on popular instances and there will likely be a number of specialized instances around a specific topic.

effingjoe,

Give it some time, and I think organically 1-2 most popular communities will emerge for each specific topic and people will then just subscribe to those ones.

This is kind of what I was thinking, too. There's no limit to how many duplicate subs there can be on Reddit but that didn't stop people from eventually finding the "main" subs. Lemmy just needs a critical mass of users first, so that the clear winners are easily seen. With numbers being so low right now, there's no clear winner among duplicates.

araquen,

While I am on board with the idea, I don’t think it should be a programmatic solution at the community level. Rather, either the third party app or the server (let’s say Beehaw for an example) should allow for the option to create collections based on community identifiers. It would be more of a display function.

The reason I think this needs to be done at the user level is because everyone has their own organization models. At one point, I had all my subreddits aggregated by Library of Congress Categories (since may home library is organized that way). Some people may want to put c/Beatles in a Music category, while others may want Bands or even others by genre.

What would be nice is if the communities had tags to identify their subject matter. For instance, c/Beatles could be etc. That way people could look by tag and aggregate that way (plus it would make it easier to find c/GeorgeHarrison c/PaulMcCartney c/JohnLennon c/RingoStarr ;-) )

The way I would see this play out is that the user would have to option to create a “Super Community” and give it a name. Then there would be a search by name, tag, subject etc. and the results would have a toggle that would add, or subscribe and add, that community to the super community.

A solution like this would preserve the sovereignty and integrity of each of the servers. All the servers are offering are possible some more discrete identifiers (should they choose) to make themselves more findable. The control is placed on the user to organize and curate their selections.

I don’t mind responding to different communities with similar subjects. I did it all the time on Reddit. But it would be nice to, say, focus on my “Apple” super community or my “Worldbuilding” super community. When you have eclectic interests that span a vast array of topics, being able to aggregate “like topics” is a boon.

knova,

I agree with this post 100%. Super Communities need to be able to be shared too - I’m sure there are some folk who will just want a quick start and would love to just subscribe to a premade “top 10 /c/technology communities” or something. And then it could be expanded later etc.

Honestly the multi Reddit model works really well. When I see a multi that I like, I can clone it and change it how I need. It basically acts like a fork.

introvrt2themax,
introvrt2themax avatar

In regards to cats specifically- do you remember how many cat subreddits there are? They had their own Wiki that tried to keep up with them all.

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

Yeah, maybe the mods of that community can set up a list of other related communities.

gunnervi,
gunnervi avatar

I think this needs to be on the user end. I get that the fediverse can be confusing for people used to centralized platforms, but what's even more confusing is trying to participate in it while the details of which community you're actually posting in are obscured. Cats@lemmy.ml is run by different people than cats@lemmy.world or cats@kbin.social and they may well have different rules and standards, and the user should be aware of this.

Now, if these different communities want to link up, or if cats@lemmy.ml wants to have an "official" group on some other fediverse platform, the way many subreddits have official discords, they should have a way to do that, the same way many users want to be ablr to link their different fediverse accounts

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