I see this suggestion as problematic and recreating a problem reddit had. One group could lay claim to territory and everyone was stuck with however good or bad the culture was in the sub and however good or bad the mods were. There were some places with mods on a powertrip creating an exclusionary or outright toxic environment.
There are better solutions to the problem. For example, letting communities follow other communities. It's simple and flexible.
Take a look at the discussion here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1595303910 or my diagram of one proposed solution.
This is genius, please devs 🙏
What if a post is acceptable by the rules/mods at instance b but the post breaks the rules at instance a?
Options:
Unless I've misunderstood something, community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you're just not looking at the full name.
Memes@lemmy.ml and Memes@sopuli.xyz are different names, for example.
Sometimes we ignore the part of the name after the @ if it's unambiguous, but it's still there.
tl;dr: I agree with OP that the ability to have multiple, identically named, disconnected communities on different instances will be a severe detriment to the adoption of the Fediverse by the general public.
community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you’re just not looking at the full name.
That's part of the problem. The simplest UI generally exposes the community name without the instance, !memes for example, but the backend is really !memes@lemmy.ml which is an entirely different community from !memes@sopuli.xyz. Now, that's not really a problem - memes are memes. But what about a community for Edinburgh, UK? There are already two - !Edinburgh@sh.itjust.works and !Edinburgh@feddit.uk. That's going to be an issue because if you choose one to participate in, you'll miss all of the content in the other. If you're a member of, say sopuli.xyz, you won't even know that either exist because their community search doesn't actually search all instances and might start a third. The whole idea of the Fediverse is to have a federation of instances which share information, and there is already talk of the biggest instances potentially creating a problem with the democratic ideals of the system (6 days into the reddit migration and three of the largest instances have defederated from one another). To have a thousand instances each with their own !Photography or !ManchesterUnited community dilutes the content and interaction.
I agree with OP ( I actually don't know how to link to a profile yet or I'd tag @TerryMatthews) that there should be some cross-linked mechanism to merge identically named communities across instances. There could still be detached instances - defederated content would not have their content propagated - but the content for each unique community would be co-mingled.
I would expect that moderators would be limited in scope to their own communities. So a mod from feddit.uk could block a non-instance post or user on their instance but it would be present on other instances. They could also block a local post on their instance and it would not be propagated at all. Pinned posts get a little more hairy - would every mod have a separate set of local instance pins? I would think that would need to be the case. The issue of sidebars is also an issue.
The ability to create multis could solve that. I could make a local Edinburgh multi, sub to both of the communities, and view them together in one feed for example.
That would definitely fix the reading side of things. As would a reader/aggregator app which allows browsing (and discovery) of all the Fediverse instances as a unified feed. It still leaves the challenge of propagating information though communities without either leaving large swaths of the community in the dark or risking multiple posts (for people who do multi./aggregate). The last programming language I can claim to have studied is Fortran (77, no less), so my hope is only that someone competent shares my concern.
The "two Edinburghs" situation already existed on Reddit. You'd get slightly different "competing" subreddits. They'd have to differentiate their names a bit but it still happened.
To flip it round - there was an issue in Reddit that whoever first set up a subreddit with a given name then owned it forever. Let's say I got there first for /r/london but then I'm a twat and either create a community of horrible people or fail to build a community at all. Everyone in London who wants a city subreddit is worse off, and at best someone has to come along and make a different subreddit with a different name to fulfill the same person. Not having this single namespace with "first mover" advantage is good and democratic. And all we have to do is pay attention to the bit after the @ sign.
That’s fair. Sometimes there are competing/unfriendly communities on the same topic (EliteDangerous and Elite_Dangerous sub mods hate each other with a fiery passion for…reasons). Since writing my post I’ve stumbled upon another poster suggesting a fix may be on the user side (a fediverse aggregating reader) rather than attempting to somehow weave communities together on the server end. That does mostly what’s needed (imho) without requiring any additional overhead on the instance ends.
This kind of reminds me of Android vs iOS. With great freedom also comes fragmentation.
As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.
Hard disagree. This allows abuse by moderator abuse similar to how reddit does it. Ideally the UI would allow you to create collections of communities based on your own groupings. And search could be expanded to find more similar communities (ie: based on keywords).
The way loading/finding and joining a totally new community into a new external instance is kinda buggy.
Yeah, basically we need somthing like public and private multireddits. Public, so you can sub to one thing to get content from many similar communities, and private, for people to organize their own stuff.
I'm one of those USENET greybeards and I think this would probably be a mistake. If you let a name be uniquely claimed by an instance, how do you decide which instance gets to be "in charge" of that?
Better IMO would be to update the various interfaces to be much more explicit about including the instance name along with the user/community name. So that it's always clear that a user or community is at a particular instance.
We do still need better migration tools for moving users and communities around, though.
Reading this just gave me an interesting idea, when you start to post a link that's already been posted in another linked instance, it will start to show you that it's been posted elsewhere to different communities in other instances (on Lemmy, I don't know about Kbin). This clearly shows there's functionality there to look around when posting links, so I wonder if similar could be implemented when creating communities.
If the interface told you ahead of time that the community you were about to create has already been created in other instances, you wouldn't be prevented from going ahead & creating your own version, but you'd be more readily aware. Honestly a win-win approach imo, considering it would help you find a community you may have been looking for but didn't think existed, and it doesn't keep you from trying to make your own anyway.
couldn't have put it better myself (also a USENET oldie but w/o the beard)
I think that would defeat a piece of the point of a decentralized system. In the current design, what will naturally happen is that if one instance has all the good content on a particular topic, most users will gravitate toward it anyway. We can read across federated instances anyway so I, a kbin user, have no problem reading something on lemmy like this.
Then let's say one day lemmyworld@lemmy.world gets taken over by people who want to post stuff I don't want to see. If I miss how it used to be here, I could go make lemmyworld@kbin.social and it would be fine.
I'm not understanding how this would work with instances who wish to defederate and segregate their community? It seems like an "all or nothing" approach that instances who have defederated already wouldn't be on board with... For instance what happens if beehaw owns the "gaming" community, and then defederates from lemmyworld. Lemmyworld users just no longer have a "gaming" community?
They may have the same name, but they have suffixes that don't actually appear, such as @lemmy.world @lemmy.lm. I oppose this idea. Because when the servers do the defedere people don't have access to that community. We have recently seen an example of this. It's okay to have more than one community with the same name, but a lemmy grouping feature can bring. In this way, we can eliminate clutter by grouping communities with the same name. At the same time, the fact that different communities with the same name have different moderation understandings provides people with an alternative in community selection. Reduces moderation pressure
As I've said elsewhere the communities sharing the same name is just a temporary problem. As the system grows one of the identically named communities will become dominant. Because of that small new communities that want to have the same topic will be incentivised to have unique name just to be able to be found.
The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we're trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.
I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.
This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.
100% agreed. I'm not advocating we "clone Reddit", however I do think we should think about and take meaningful steps to improve accessibility to non-"techy" people even if that means borrowing a few things from Reddit here and there.
Because let's face it, Reddit wasn't a whole-cloth original creation of spez and kn0thing. It's bones can be traced back to Digg, vBulletin, earlier BBS incarnations, in some respects even USENET - especially the way users can create topics/communities/subreddits on their own (yes, I know this isn't how USENET works now, but I promise it used to work this way if you were outside the main controlled newsgroups).
I'm a smart guy. I've got a lot of years of internet experience. I can make Lemmy work, and find content on it. It's cumbersome. My wife, is very techy by any reasonable standard but not as much as I am, has difficulty using it. She finds the structure unintuitive and confusing.
If those of us participating in this thread are the 0.1%, she's the 1%. To me, this moment, this movement, is about ensuring there's a place where people are free to discuss things that monied interests can no longer control. That's what makes the fediverse great - we can spread the load and demand out and make it manageable for normal people to do this.
I don't want another schmuck coming along telling me what ad I have to look at, or what I'm not allowed to discuss, or what app I have to use ever again.
I'm not the smartest guy in the room, I'm not claiming to have the answer only a suggestion. However, I am confident that this is a problem we need to tackle in some way if we ever want to achieve growth in "normal users".
Ether that or allow formeta-communities so that the 500 duplicate copies of "Technology" can self aggregate.
Which I don't really think we want because it's all about context based on the instance. Technology@slrpnk.net would be all about solar tech whereas technology@beehaw.org would be more science and consumer electronics.
I think the mods of each sub should agree to aggregate using an "invite". It could also allow subs that have slightly different names on different instances to team up, if they are essentially the same thing.
I disagree respectfully, as I think this is a feature and not a bug of a federated structure. It's well known that reddit suffers from the "20K Law", which is that "The quality of any subreddit drops off a cliff after it gets more than 20K subscribers". Which is likely because that is the limit of effective manual moderation.
So, having multiple communities on the same topic would be a fundamental fix to that issue, as instead of one giant community, instead you get different, smaller communities with different culture on the same topic, whose users can still talk to each other.
I think the current system is fine as is, we're not trying to remake a better reddit, we are trying to be better than the limits of reddit.
I think it's a feature, not a problem. If you have multiple communities for popular topics, if one or two of them turn toxic or have unpopular moderation policies you have other places to go. Think of it like forums, popular topics had many forums to choose from - but each had slightly different cultures. Also since forums could individually be quite small, they were often a lot friendlier.
Federation makes it easy to explore different communities, but we don't need to import the bad parts of centralisation.
Having sibling communities would be another approach.
Each one is still homed on their instance, but if the instances are federated the posts from the other instances automatically flow into the community. They would still show the originating instance, but content would be comingled.
Along those lines, what if communities could suggest other related communities, and clients could (by default, but optionally) also show posts that the communities your subscribe to recommend?
It's a little like soft federation, but on the client side - or, think of it like an automatic way to make multi subs while still allowing users to change it, and giving mods a less nuclear option if they don't like how a community on another instance is going.
This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.
I think this is perhaps the most compelling part of your thinking here, but at the same time, I'm more drawn by the idea of improved portability of instance information than the synchronization.
I may be mistaken, but I think a fundamental aspect of the federation model is the independent operations of each community while enabling their intercommunication, and the sort of synchronization you suggest would be a violation of each instance's autonomy to a degree. Not to say it's a bad idea, just that I think it would better fit a different networking model than what I think the federated model seems to be pursuing.
What if there was a way for communities to self opt-in to an aggregate name. The magazine settings could have an aggregate name that makes them show up under the aggregate tag. Kinda like a hashtag, but controlled at the mod lvl, and completely separate from hashtags.
I understand your idea, but I think it would defeat the purpose of the fediverse. It would create single points of failure that are un-correctable.
I also think many people forget that Reddit never functioned any differently. Everyone seems to have forgotten (and I’m not saying you have!) that there are and were always multiple subreddits for any given topic. With slightly differing names. The only reason people are forgetting this is because eventually one or a handful became pre-eminent and the others died or became transformed into something more niche.
I think it’s a problem that will ultimately correct itself, but I think a tags based system, like hashtags in Mastodon, would be a better solution for tying communities/magazines together through metadata.
To your point, Seattle had 2 subreddits due to disagreement on moderation lol.
USENET was a mess too, though... The entire Alt.* hierarchy was an attempt to route around censorship and I'm pretty sure I recall lots of duplication of groups. /derail
Communities should have categories/hashtags that users can optionally sub to, like the 'metacommunities' like plz1 said but optional and multiple. Mastodon does hashtagging and can be done on a post by post basis. The forum software Flarum has a 'tag'/category system and an additional hashtag system, so what I'm thinking of is more like the Flarum system since it would be awkward to hashtag every single post in a community/magazine/whatever.
So if I wanted to just get solarpunk tech I'd sub to that, but if I wanted that and even moar I'd sub to a generalized Tech tag. Make sense?
Solution is hashtags + community name, not a "fedicommrc".
I was in FidoNet with a BBS in 1988 and on the Internet since 1990 first through a dialup vt100 connection to a Unix login access point for usenet and email before the Internet was available to the public. Communities are a special interest of mine. I started a particularly good one for Permaculture using a mailing list with email. I still run it. Noone should, for example, OWN the only permaculture community in the Fediverse. What are others who want their own going to do to gain users and generate traffic? call it permaculture2 or thatotherpermaculturecommunity or permaculture-general or permaculture-westernworld. Letting one group control any particular Fediverse named community is a really bad idea. Have you ever started and run a community (newsgroup, mailing list, subforum, fb group, google group, webforum, whatever)? Having one group control any named community is bad enough but everyone with an instance having to deal with a fixed list of communities for the entire Fediverse is absurd. You could easily have a multiplicity of communities with the same name but identified with hashtags for subjects they specialize it. This should solve your problem with community naming and with this no distributed list of communities for instances to carry would be needed. You could carry 6 different permaculture communities and each would be uniquely identified with hashtags alone. Make sure to code the software to feature those hashtags prominently along with the community name for ease of finding and subscribing to them.
Are you talking about a Fediverse version of a Usenet newsrc? Those who install an instance and want their own communities named as they choose would just do that and ignore any network-wide policy. Other instances can block them for doing that but they can simply connect with other like minded instances and form their own network and forget Federation. This is especially true when some gang of control freaks own a named community, i.e. permaculture. That is not going to fly. Disunity but independence within the Fediverse will rule.
The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance […]
So, you know, domain name? Kinda stopped there.
Yeah I think tags or some other way to congregate similar content from different instances would improve my experience a lot. I got like 3 same subs now on 3 instances and all their content is small, if those three were linked somehow say through a tag, they could interact with each other a lot easier and it would seem like one bigger community.
This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.
Indeed, does it not make sense in a fediverse where you can forward or change your account to another instance a community, be it called magazine or lemmy can change instance as well.
It would also be a protection.
Already now we are seeing some instances of lemmy's / magazines growing larger than others e.g. selfhosted on lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml
Image in a year time if the largest of the communities would suddenly drop out (database corruption, server takedown, admin issue) again all the knowledge / posts are again lost and difficult to recover.
Or does it already work that way and I'm still not really grasping this hole fediverse thing?
My understanding is that if an instance suddenly dies, all the federated instances that subscribe to its communities will still have the text content because they store copies locally. So knowledge should not just go away. Media is a different story though.
I think new posts/comments in those communities would then not federate at all anymore since the host instance would not acknowledge them. So the communities turn into isolated local ones.
If the host instance comes back and the communities are re-created, they’ll be empty on the host instance but I think other instances won’t delete the old content unless explicitly requested.
I'm personally ok with multiple technology instances. It was weird at first, but I think that is by design.
I do agree that user management needs a redesign. I have three fediverse usernames that I created because I was a noob and everytime it asked me to login I would get denied and create an account. This would be absolutely awful for the normies.
This is where IPFS might actually be useful. Also this might help fight the trolls.
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