this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Yeah, it is kind of confusing for the average user why there is a !Technology@lemmy.ml and a !Technology@beehaw.org community. If you subscribe to both you will see topics twice. If you subscribe to only one you can miss things out.
I have a shower thought earlier about this: what if there was a feature exclusive to community mods that allows communities similar to theirs to form a group?
Now what would the group do? Communities that are members of those groups basically would share data with each other and sync posts between each other. Community mods could send invites to similar communities on other instances to form a group. Say for example, technology@beehaw.org and technology@lemny.ml are in one group. Now if I post in Beehaw's technology community, it would also appear in Lemmy.ml's technology community because they are in the same group (probably with a flair-like feature that would indicate the instance from where the post comes from). Upvotes and comments will also be synced between the communities as well.
Now, what about moderation? The community mods in the respective instances still have power over what the community sees and if it obeys the community rules. Community mods could filter what posts would appear in their community's version. So if, for example, a person from lemmy.ml's technology community were to post something that goes against beehaw's tech community rules, the mods from Beehaw can block that post from appearing in the Beehaw tech community. It would not affect the Lemmy.ml community though. In this way, it preserves the decentralization of the fediverse while at the same time, making it intuitive for users too because they don't have to switch between similar communities because they can stay on their instances and still get content from the other instances with similar topics.
Completely agree that this is how it should work.
Ah, so do you literally see the same exact posts twice if you do that? Super annoying but filtering duplicates in the background seems like something that could be easily fixed (unless I'm missing something). Hopefully more interest will lead to more open source contributors!
No, that's not what I meant :-).
For example:
It's like there is an r/technology and an r/tech with only small differences. Hopefully they'll either become more different or somehow merge
This is what I think people need to understand. This problem also occurred on Reddit frequently. In the early days there were multiple subreddits for a single topic and over time with growth, one of them won out. I doubt lemmy.ml and beehaw.org's technology communities are both going to grow at the same rate. Eventually one will get bigger faster and become the de facto tech community.
The only problem I find with this approach is that it will favour the "main" instances, thus recentralizing the app.
I don't even think it's an approach so much as an inevitability that certain communities will grow and develop into the de facto ones for their respective subjects. Especially because people are attracted to communities where they can find more discussions. But yeah, I really hope the communities don't all just end up pooling in the largest instance. Hopefully they grow and develop across many smaller instances.
There are probably better solutions but I guess simplest way would be to solve that at the client end?
Give users the option to merge community views from different instances (maybe too much hassle for the average user), have the client do it automatically for some specified communities, or have a mechanism by which the communities can hint the client to merge their content with specific "friend" communities.
From users POV the last option would be the easiest (but it should be possible to opt out of it or customize the behaviour). To prevent trolling and harassment the merging would require an authentication from all participating communities. That doesn't prevent multiple posts on the same subject but if majority of users see the same combined content the likelihood of double posts decreases. It would still spread the load between instances, and if they want the different instances could specialize on different aspects of the subject.
Just a thought. I don't know if it makes any sense from technical point, maybe it would be easy to implement without any changes on the underlying protocols or maybe it would require some ugly kludges and would just overcomplicate everything or is something not many people would even need or want.
This is why Iโm desperate for Apollo to come to the fediverse. Christian would absolutely build these features in and it would make the entire fediverse more accessible.