We should have something like federated communities

Communities on different instances about the same topic should have the option to essentially federate so a post on one appears on all of them and opening any of them shows you the comments from all of them. This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post. Federation could be decided by the community mods and the comments can have a little “/c/communityname@instance.name” on it so you know which community the comment was originally posted on.

OldWoodFrame,

Gotta say I like merged communities better than just multireddits. The problem we’re trying to solve is that one community of 1000 people is more than 10x better than 10 communities with 100 people, because instead of a bunch of posts or comments with less than 5 upvotes you get true content curation.

Would have to be voluntary and maybe there could be two levels, one where mods can only mod what is “truly” posted to their instance, and another where any mod can moderate anything in the combined community.

zelifcam, (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    czech,
    czech avatar

    You are literally describing reddit. Allowing mods to federate communities together would be novel.

    The beauty of the fediverse is that when one volunteer-run server goes down (as happens all the time) there is little disruption if your feed is filling with other instance's content. You can't count on these volunteer-run servers to have 99.9% uptime like reddit, they can disappear over night.

    Same idea for communities. If lemmy.world disappears tomorrow there are dozens of communities that disappear with it; fragmented across the fediverse. If mods of those communities were federated with complementary communities on other instances then there is no disruption.

    I don't think that communities should automatically federate, it should be agreed to by the mods. But with the current population we can't afford to keep identical communities isolated. Many will die a slow death when together it could have been thriving.

    zelifcam,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    czech,
    czech avatar

    All I'm saying is that if /c/butterflies exists on multiple instances they should be able to "aggregate" themselves as if they were one instance. We don't have enough users to isolate small communities; they have no shot here.

    If large federated communities want to exclude others... those others can just form their own federated group. We're still in a much better position than if we had one large community on a single instance or a speckling of tiny ones across the fediverse that aren't large enough to drive engagement.

    In the current model small communities are forced to choose a server. When that server goes down we lose an entire community. Two examples off the top of my head are Firefox and Android. We can't count on legends to save us every time. And why go through that chaos when we have the underlying systems to avoid it?

    zelifcam, (edited )

    deleted_by_author

    •
    czech,
    czech avatar

    require all participating communities to store ALL of the data.

    Wait, what? No, not at all. There is no reason for them to redundantly store all the data.

    Imagine the same concept but the data is just being aggregated. The purpose is that content gets more exposure and engagement not to create an archive.

    zelifcam, (edited )

    deleted_by_author

    •
    czech,
    czech avatar

    Is that so different than how the fediverse currently works? Subscribed content is already being federated across instances I'm just asking it to be organized together. When your instance federates with a community on another instance it doesn't get the entire "5-year" backlog sent to it; only new posts and old content that someone interacts with is sent.

    I think there are limits to the scalability of the fediverse, in general, I just don't see how organizing the data differently is breaking anything. Only the most limited servers are going to be impacted from receiving content from three /c/butterflies instead of one. Most people are probably subscribed to the duplicate communities already; I certainly am.

    serialized_kirin,

    ehhhh, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! personally i think it makes vastly more sense to federate on a per community basis rather than a per instance basis. an instance is most likely going to hold a vast array of users and topics in an ideal world, in which case the general consensus on what is and what is not considered to be relevant or desirable content for the given group is likely quite difficult-- there's nothing to go on, as everyone's talking about different things and holds markedly different values because of it. But communities? Perfect sense! Every community is about a very specific subject/topic, and comes with a set of rules/values for everyone who wishes to post/interact with it. Once you get to the granularity of federated communities, it no longer feels quite so high handed to federate or de-federate with something, because the general consensus of the community is assumedly much more clear.

    Sure, leaving automatic federating up to the client makes sense, but the meat of it sounds like a much better level of granularity for decision-making for something that impacting than it being server-wide...

    But perhaps I am simply way off mark. my experience is small, in comparison to my conviction lol.

    JoeCoT,
    JoeCoT avatar

    Even thinking of it in terms of non-fediverse platforms. reddit often had multiple subreddits about the same exact topic. But the communities were different, often even splinters from each other because of disagreements on content and moderation. You end up with the original sub, Foo, followed by FooMemes, and TrueFoo, TrollFoo, FooJerk, etc.

    If communities start getting merged together automatically, it's going to end up causing problems. Most likely the culture of someplace like lemmy.ml will end up being marketedly different than some other instances (and already is). I would not want posts from a memes group there mixed with a memes group from elsewhere. Grouping the same post client side, sure. But there's a reason for separate groups about the same topic.

    Pandantic,
    @Pandantic@midwest.social avatar

    I would say that it would work if communities could agree to federate because they believe their content and user base is similar enough to make sense, and splinter communities would not be federated because they are for different purposes.

    ElectricAirship,
    @ElectricAirship@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    No, then there is no point to Lemmy being federated at all.

    Better to just have each community develop their own flavor on the same topic imo

    Poggervania,
    Poggervania avatar

    I mostly agree with this, but I also think there should be some way of being able to collate the same 5 communities on 5 different instances under 1 view. I said this when I first came onto the Fediverse, but maybe having a tagging system for each instance would allow for both; users could look up instances with, say, a “news” tag and get every instance with that tag - and this way, the communities would still be separate and can develop differently from one another.

    biddy,

    Just make it like multireddits on Reddit. It allows you to collate multiple communities into one feed.

    DharkStare,

    I agree with this 100%. It would also help with QOL since I won’t need to follow a bunch of the same communities spread out over numerous instances.

    epique,

    I like the idea. I suspect it would make moderation a challenge but it sounds pretty useful

    NickwithaC,
    @NickwithaC@lemmy.world avatar

    This was the idea behind MultiReddits if I’m not mistaken. In which case a simple operator like:

    Fediverse@lemmy.world+Fediverse@lemmy.ml

    Could get baked into the Lemmy core to allow this to work.

    PeleSpirit,

    I asked the Lemmy devs about multi-reddits type subscribing and they said that it’s on their list but they need help developing it because they have a huge list. I like the multiereddits way because then the user decides and there isn’t extra mods (managers) sprinkled in.

    clgoh,

    That’s the way I think it should work.

    dameoutlaw,
    @dameoutlaw@lemmy.ml avatar

    What are MultiReddits and how do they work?

    Hobbes,

    Basically you can see multiple subreddits of your choosing as if they are a single subreddit.

    dameoutlaw,
    @dameoutlaw@lemmy.ml avatar

    Oh wow, that can be beneficial to some people. Thank you for taking the time to explain

    starphish,

    Here’s how it’s done. You just add a +, then the other subreddit. Now your view has 2 subreddits.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/books+ebooks/

    JackbyDev,

    That’s still just two separate communities. Like a filter. That’s fine. That’s not what OP is suggesting though. What OP is suggesting is much more extreme.

    SmoothSurfer,

    If all federated communities could decide upon to regulate same rules, every one of them could be moderated by their own moderators. But the problem I see here is the things that’s being federated is in reality server itself which means it would be impossible(not sure but at least not necessary) to do such a thing. But anyone can easily build an app to collect posts from same communities, it does not require to play with activitypub, just lemmy api.

    CrayonRosary,

    Federation already solves the issue you have. If every user subscribed to every instance of /c/cats, then they would all see every post and could comment on each of them. There’s nothing gained by having another level of federation other than making it slightly easier to subscribe to all of them at once.

    Personally, I’d rather see user-controlled “multireddits”, but better. You group together any number of communities and give the group a name. Then make it easy to publish the group as a link that others can view and import into their account.

    All we really need is any easy way for people to subscribe to multiple instance of “cats” with one tap. (And to unsubscribe just as easily). I think the best way to do this is with user-driven, sharable community groups.

    For example, I could make a group that includes “cats”, “kittens”, “jellybean toes”, “cat photos”, “cat bellies”, “chonkers”, and whatever else. They don’t even need to have the same name. Then I can share that somewhere. Mods could put popular groupings in sidebars. Fediverse websites could have whole lists of popular groupings.

    Plus you could have an additional feature: Lemmy could let you view one of your groups as a feed, just like you currently can view “Subscribed”, “Local”, or “Everything”. Sometimes you just want to see cat photos and not be bothered by world news or politics.

    Microw,

    I still don’t get what the point is of multiple instances with the same communities. Your proposal is a fix for a problem that doesnt need to exist IMO. Just have one thematic community be on one specific instance, and a community for a different topic on a different instance

    CrayonRosary,

    Any instance could go down forever at any point. Should all cat photos ever posted to Lemmy be on one instance? Hell no.

    Besides, my idea is about combining any communities into a group. They could be duplicates like you’re assuming, or just closely related, like cat communities. Or I could group together several different sports teams communities into one feed to let me just view those communities when I feel like it.

    monobot,

    I like this idea and it sounds easy to implement without changing underlying infrastructure.

    It would be nice being able to publish communities I follow and check out other people feeds, not only similar communities’

    1984,
    @1984@lemmy.today avatar

    Good idea but this will lead to even more centralization if it’s decided by the instances who their communities federates with.

    The top ones will federate and leave the small instances out of the loop. Or put demands on other instances they have to fulfill to be part of the community federation.

    It all ends up similar to Reddit in the end. Maybe it’s unavoidable and we cant have properly decentralized now when it’s centralized.

    luthis, (edited )

    There are requests for this in the works. If I didn’t have almost 1000 comments I would find the links but there’s no search function for comments :/

    Ah I found it!

    lemmy.world/post/318115

    github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071

    codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/149

    CrayonRosary,

    All 3 of those links are broken. For some reason you put [1], [2] or [3] in each URL.

    lemmy.world/post/318115

    github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071

    codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/149

    luthis,

    I just copied them from my comment…

    Now your urls have the same thing!

    Is it just me?

    luthis,

    OHHH I know what it is. It’s an extension for lemmy that adds numbers at the end so you can press 1 and go to link 1 etc.

    I wonder if I can turn that off.

    CrayonRosary,

    I’m glad you figured it out, but you should edit your comment to take the numbers out so the links work.

    csolisr,

    There is one major problem with the implementation that I hope you can understand with an example. Suppose there are three forums - motorsports@example1.com, motorsports@example2.net and motorsports@example3.org, which eventually start mirroring each other by default. Let’s also suppose that a user is, for whatever reason, banned from example1.com but not from example2.net or example3.org. Should the user try to subscribe to motorsports@example2.net, must the latter honor the ban list from example1.com and ban the user as well, or should each instance have its own ban list, knowing well that users can evade bans by subscribing to another of the mirrored communities?

    nix,
    @nix@merv.news avatar

    They can have their own ban lists and users on the instance as the banned user won’t see the same banned users posts just like how federation works now

    csolisr,

    Alright, but should the banned user be able to see posts from the banned instance if they’re cross-posted to a non-banned instance?

    mark,
    @mark@programming.dev avatar

    I agree. For the people that dont want to see your home feed cluttered with duplicate content, it may be time to just start subscribing to your favorite Lemmy communities using RSS feeds for more control.

    There’s an RSS feed for anything on Lemmy using Open RSS. For instance, the RSS feed for this community is here:

    openrss.org/lemmy.world/c/fediverse

    You can also get feeds for comments on specific posts.

    YourHuckleberry,

    This is a really good idea. Multi-instance communities would not just provide content redundancy, but also some load balancing. Each multi-instance community would become it’s own little CDN. Duplicating the data across instances does pose a problem of bloat, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

    JackbyDev,

    You can already view a community from any instance. Just subscribe to communities you want. Support more and smaller instances of you want more decentralization. Lemmy.world going down taking out so many communities with it is a problem of too much being hosted there. Everything you’re describing basically already exists. It would be very silly to force communities to merge with other ones. Just because they have the same name doesn’t mean they have the same rules.

    YourHuckleberry,

    OP didn’t say force. OP specifically said allow.

    CrayonRosary,

    But then you have all the same federation politics and drama at the community level like we do at the instance level. It’d be such a mess.

    Just make it easier for users to subscribe to each instance of a community with one tap. And let them view them all grouped in one feed.

    And better yet, let people combine any communities together into a personal group; not just ones with the same name. There’s no need to get mods involved at all. I wrote more about this in another comment.

    cerevant,

    No, and the difference between Beehw and Lemmy.world is why. Different people have different views about moderation and what is acceptable content.

    There are two solutions to the real problem of duplicate content:

    1. Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
    2. Making crossposting a reference to the original post, not a copy. Mods would need to be able to block crossposts from specific communities, and remove crossposts to their sub.
    sxan,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    These are solvable technical issues.

    If community mods on different servers saw they have similar moderation guidelines, they could agree to federate. If they diverge in the future or disagree, they could defederate. Just like instances can defederate from previously federated servers today. It would be no more or less disruptive than defederation is today.

    Heck, if done thoughtfully, it could even allow cross moderation, multiplying the number of mods for like-minded communities. The only mods who wouldn’t appreciate that are the egotistical, power hungry, Redditish mods.

    cerevant, (edited )

    If the mods can agree on policy, there is absolutely no reason to have two communities. Shut one down and use the other.

    Edit: can someone explain to me what the difference between synchronizing two communities and subscribing to a federated community is? I mean, that’s exactly the point of federation.

    YourHuckleberry,

    That system makes the instance a single-point-of-failure for the whole community, which has been a big problem lately. If communities could easily be multi-instance they would have redundancy. That seems like a good reason to me.

    lemmyporn,

    Yes power mods should be able to eat up keywords across the community. And I’m sure they various admins will all agree how to handle these communities once they don’t like what’s being posted.

    bstix,

    Maybe the solution is more on the client side. An app should be able to let the user add communities from different instances and present them as one, maybe even merge comments from identical posts etc. Then if the user gets fed up with some instance not moderating or spamming, the user could then just remove that from his multi list.

    Technically there’s no way to please everyone on this, but there’s also no reason why the apps couldn’t present a meta-view of what is actually happening across instances, if that’s what the user prefers. Most users don’t want to see the gears turn.

    In addition to the user experience it would also minimize any “damages” from any instance going down, because the multi list would remain active as long as any of the instances are up.

    deafboy,
    @deafboy@lemmy.world avatar

    You’re absolutely right! Easy and simple fix, which does not require any more decision rights, or extra responsibilities, being given to the instance operators.

    Obi,
    @Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

    Maybe you can subscribe to “news” and it gives you a submenu where you can tick which instances you want to include in your own selection of “news” community.

    It still leaves the question of how it deals with crossposts of the same article to multiple instances.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • fediverse@lemmy.world
  • tacticalgear
  • DreamBathrooms
  • InstantRegret
  • magazineikmin
  • khanakhh
  • Youngstown
  • ngwrru68w68
  • slotface
  • everett
  • rosin
  • thenastyranch
  • kavyap
  • GTA5RPClips
  • cisconetworking
  • JUstTest
  • normalnudes
  • osvaldo12
  • ethstaker
  • mdbf
  • modclub
  • Durango
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • cubers
  • Leos
  • anitta
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •