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.
Yeah seeing same article about american politics posted cross half dozen communities on different instances really is killing my feed.
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Lemmy has a crosspost functionality for this very thing but AFAIK none of the apps implement it at this point.
I like the idea. I suspect it would make moderation a challenge but it sounds pretty useful
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.
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.
That’s the way I think it should work.
What are MultiReddits and how do they work?
Basically you can see multiple subreddits of your choosing as if they are a single subreddit.
Oh wow, that can be beneficial to some people. Thank you for taking the time to explain
Here’s how it’s done. You just add a +, then the other subreddit. Now your view has 2 subreddits.
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.
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.
There is a really interesting dev discussion on this topic here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033
On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone’s All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.
To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix that issue.
Keeping communities separate is the simplest way to go, tbh. Sharing karma could lead to weird brigades, like r/ScreenshotsAreHard cross-posting from every picture of screens on the Fediverse and then mass-downvoting from there.
To me, the best solution would be to implement multireddits. That way, you can have your cat multilemmy of 100 communities without affecting your main feed, but you could also do the same for related or identical communities. Plus, moderators could create a multilemmy and display it prominently in their sidebar.
Being able to subscribe to a multi would solve that issue
I agree that my idea probably wouldn’t be great, for the reasons we both stated. While multicommunities are a good idea, I’m not sure they address the specific issue bothering me either, of crossposts spamming the All feed. OP’s idea might help with that a little - but honestly, I just think the ‘Hot’ algorithm needs some more fine tuning, and perhaps custom logic to avoid showing duplicates.
Wouldn’t a multilemmy still run into an issue where duplicate posts or cross posts show up multiple times in a feed?
Even if we wanted to solve that problem, right now there is no way to cross-post on Lemmy. There’s a cross-post button, but it actually does a repost. I think we should think about that when Lemmy implements a cross-post feature in the first place.
Not something I’m interested in.
My instance aggressively defends the rights of trans folk and other minorities, so the moderators and the admins of any communities based on our instance will come down hard on transphobes and the like.
That’s just not true of most of the rest of the threadiverse though, which means that merging just wouldn’t work
How would this be any different then how it works now? Banned users would still be banned on your instance
Different than*
But it actually should be different from.
Oh, a wild grammar Nazi appears!
You’re right though :-)
That’s an important and valid concern. What if the community federation could allow mods on your instance to ban users from other instances? You’d not see that user’s posts or comments when viewing a community from your instance. The downside is that your mods would have more work.
Not enough. The idea is to fuck the transphobes off so that they’re not welcome in the group, not to give them space to harass some of the members instead of all of the members.
Oh no someone has a different opinion than you REEEE permaban the “transphobic”.
Welcome to the bubble.
Exhibit A
you are an example of why they’re so strict about it
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
While I agree there should be functionality to propagate changes to a community between instances when the host is offline, there is no practical way to share administrative control of a community. Any decision by an administrator to sanction a community or defederate an instance will just result in exactly the fragmentation you fear.
The real solution is for small groups of communities with similar interests to gather on separate instances with few or no users. Meanwhile, other instances gather users with few or no local communities. This maximizes the benefits of cacheing community content while minimizing the impact of defederation. If a community host can no longer be maintained by its owner, that ownership can be easily transferred without transferring the burden of hosting hundreds of communities or supporting user logins.
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.
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!
https://lemmy.world/post/318115
All 3 of those links are broken. For some reason you put [1], [2] or [3] in each URL.
https://lemmy.world/post/318115
I just copied them from my comment…
Now your urls have the same thing!
Is it just me?
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.
I’m glad you figured it out, but you should edit your comment to take the numbers out so the links work.
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
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.
Just make it like multireddits on Reddit. It allows you to collate multiple communities into one feed.
Who moderates it?
If communities have agreed to federate with each other, mod status should federate and mods of any of the federated communities should be able to moderate any content.
If it’s one way (e.g. !technology@lemmy.world absorbs content from !technology@lemmy.ml but not the other way around) then the absorbing instance lemmy.world can moderate all content but it doesn’t federate to lemmy.ml.
The problem with this was given by one of the lemmy devs—imagine @news on a tech focused instance and @news on a star trek focused instance, they are not going to have any crossover of content as they’re effectively entirely different communities.
Similar would happen with local language differences like @football or @chips on an American vs a British instance
Although as a Brit I would completely be here for the chaos of that second scenario
No, this is completely solved by my suggestion.
I 100% agree that we shouldn’t push communities together. Instead, give the option for a community to nominate other communities where the content should be aggregated into the community.
Add an option as to whether the mods of those remote communities also get mod powers on the local community.
Behind the scenes, keep everything separate, but when generating the list of posts, aggregate posts across any listed community.
I guess that would mitigate most issues if that’s possible within the activitypub protocol.
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of mutually approved relationship between non-people doesn’t exist as a concept out of the box. Possibly using the hashtag concept under the hood to do this, but that would not require the mutual approval in the rest of the fediverse even if Lemmy enforced it
I think there are less hurdles than you’d think. Having content from another community served up when the feed is requested for the local community is a server feature not a federation feature. Moderators are the hard part, but in version one you don’t need their powers to be federated.
It’s the kind of thing you kinda have to just start trying (in a fork, say), then work out the kinks before putting the functionality into Lemmy. However, there are a lot more pressing issues at the moment, so it’s probably something better left for down the line.
i can’t decide if a one-way-moderation-scheme-type-thingy like that is beautifully simple solution, or one fraught with annoying hidden complications lol that’s a sick idea.
I think it would work if you didn’t overcomplicate it.
I don’t know that one-way solves the problem…you could “Absorb content” with an overzealous user or a bot. It wouldn’t subscribe the .world and .ml users to the same community.
Ideally you want someone to be able to subscribe to !technology@all or something.
It would be a frontend thing. Track separate communities behind the scenes but show them together in the frontend if the community settings tell you to.
!technology@all
I guess the problem here is there is no central server. Different instances know about different communities. You could have an instance side setting to show all communities with the same name together. However, this messes up location based communities (!politics!politics@lemmy.nz is for New Zealand politics, and merging with !politics@lemmy.world would be a bad idea). It would also mean the control is taken away from thw community itself. Doing it in that way would make moderation complicated.
I think having the ability for a community to opt to join with others is a better idea, though I admit I don’t know all the implementation details.
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
Each lemmy Server should’ve been it’s own subreddit.
Definitely not.
For every individual community you would have to pay for a domain, maintain the instance, keep it updated, keeping it secure, and keeping it paid. That’s really difficult already with a single server, let alone multiple for multiple servers and domains. These are also more points where data from other servers can be cached and get hacked/leaked or outright incompatible Lemmy versions.
It’d also still have the problem of multiple communities with the same topic, so it’s not solving anything.
How do you expect people to migrate to Lemmy if these are the ridiculous hoops they’re expected to do to start a community. Instead, they can just go to reddit and click a “create subreddit” button instead. What option do you think they’d choose?
How do you expect people to migrate to lemmy when you have the five thousand people split amongst ten servers with world news
That’s the beauty of decentralization and should be encouraged that way. Those are two different problems though. The issue of different servers with the same community topics is being figured out right now, the devs have a couple different ideas on how they’re tackling that. The other issue is onboarding, so finding a server and signing up is much simpler and streamlined. These are both issues that can be greatly improved upon.
Well, can’t you just go to a Lemmy server and click “create community”?
Yes, they’re saying they’d rather get rid of that and have the entire Lemmy server be dedicated to one community.
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I’ve had that thought too- it would guarantee instance owners are dedicated to making one community as awesome as they can, but at the same time the current structure means non-technically inclined people are able to have a home off-Reddit as long as their values align with the instance owner.
That said, Startrek.website is kinda doing a focused-topic thing with different communities and rules within to achieve different goals working with the same subject matter. I think it could serve as a good model for themed instances.
It still could
Its* own
🤓
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:
https://openrss.org/lemmy.world/c/fediverse
You can also get feeds for comments on specific posts.
