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What about allowing communities to federate with others?
Eg. The mods at gaming@lemmy.ml and gaming@beehaw.org could decide their communities have the same audience and ideology. They choose to federate with each other so anyone that subscribes to either or both will get posts for both. Mods will then work together to moderate.
Then if 1 set of mods decide to change their policies or go in a different direction they can then de-federate and break the 2 communities apart again.
I think this would be the easiest way honestly. It seems the least extra work or changes. Mods don't even need to work together, just with their own posts. If they're too different on their own, they won't federate anyways.
If people really want a supergroup, it would in this situation only take a new community that does nothing but federate existing ones. But it may not even be needed.
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I kind of like the idea for B. I'm not sure how to determine who the authoritarian figure would be to decide which 'cats' get to be in 'super cats'. Could some be excluded from the super group if they're pro-dogs/racist/etc? Is that against the whole idea?
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.
I also think option B is a good idea. It could split up the load of a large topic.
As for maintaining the distributed philosophy of Lemmy, I think it could possibly work by moderators of each community vote on/approve other members of a super community, like and alliance or union. They may want to agree on a standard set of rules. Then if you subscribe to one, it can pick up the others automatically. And if a community/moderators go rogue then the members of the super community moderators could vote to expel that community.
This keeps it still mostly simple/automatic for most users while allowing for a decentralized way to group communities and handle bad actors.
Not sure how feasible it is on the technical side or how it would fit into ActivityPub. But hopefully we find some solution to these fractured communities.
There absolutely needs to be a good way of finding communities here on lemmy, that would probably mitigate the problem a bit. I also like your sticky solution linking to similar communities, but it would be great if this happened automatically (or semiautomatically) when creating communities. As in: oh you are trying to create a "technology" community on your instance? Did you have a look at these ones with the same name on federated instances?
For what its worth I just spend this morning scraping a list of communities from the dozen largest Lemmy instances. ANd last night for no good reason other than it existed in Reddit, I created !lemmy411@lemmy.ca
Today's Lemmyverse Community Listing: https://lemmy.ca/post/612259
Love the idea. The drive.google.com is requesting permission, can you make it more open? Or paste it in a pastebin?
Whups. try now.
Are you aware of the community browser? Works great for finding communities across all instances
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.
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.
I had the same thought here: https://kbin.social/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/9828/uhhh-what-do-I-call-the-subreddits#entry-comment-42869
B sounds like a sensible solution to the issue, but maybe not so much in a thing that communities "join", but rather "connect" to. The former sounds like a centralized thing that has to be hosted somewhere, the latter being something that exists purely through the communities that are part of it. However, I suspect this needs to be a feature within the actual fediverse type protocol that all those instances (including Mastodon) use, to make this an actual possibility.
Maybe using tags? A community can tag itself in areas it wants to both be included in and excluded from. And allow users to surf tag feeds to comment and upvote on, also allow us to organise our communities within groups in our own way?
I had the same idea. Tags are already there to gather posts related to a topic in a single page. The difference in experience would be the curation reddit's subreddit system allows. Curation and moderation. Otherwise, an agreed upon tagging scheme should do the trick if the only concern is subscribing to topics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Great ideas, sounds ideal to me
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.
To some extent, this reminds me of the old BBS system. Local BBS had their own discussion boards, but they could join a larger one called 'fidonet' which allowed them to share global discussion groups between other BBS. So you could have a local news section, but there might be a news section on fido which would include more global topics. They were fully independent.
That made sense in the context of early the early 90s though, now it's a bit different. social media which is too far splintered ends up not being that social. Good to have alternatives, but yes, if you have 250 different cat groups, it's almost overload. There needs to be some kind of a happy medium there.
Even within Reddit communities, a lot of posts ended up in multiple places, and the 'crossposting' function seemed off to me, because everyone voted on and commented in different places.
I wonder if a 'tag' system wouldn't work better, where a post shows up under multiple hashtags. This way, a picture could go under '#sea #thalassophobia #submarines #pictures' all at once.
If everyone votes on the same post, posts would receive negative attention for inappropriate tags (I'm assuming that people would downvotes pictures of cats which had the #dogs hashtag).
I’m assuming that people would downvotes pictures of cats which had the #dogs hashtag
Honestly I'm not sure. One problem on reddit is that people just upvote things they like that show up on their frontpage regardless of where it's posted, which means all the big subs blur together.
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 #britishinvasion #music #beatles #band #60srock 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.
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.
You’re already posting in a super community!
Aww shucks bloodfart ☺️
Kind of like multireddits? I hope so
We definitely need multireddits here! And cross-posts. Helps immensely in aggregating and discovering communities!
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' :)
Have my upvote. Without such an ability, I fear fragmentation of communities will be a fatal flaw holding back Lemmy's success
I personally like the idea of a linking bot that would cross post automatically accross communities and deduplicate things posted by the same user on both.
You could also just cross post things with relevent tags and crosspost then in relevent communties
Lemmy is decentralised, so there's no way to establish the concept of a 'super community' without decided a specific instance plays that role - an instance that, ultimately, is hobby run and just as vulnerable to outages as the others. What happens when the instance running the Super goes down?
There's also no way to make a Super any more official than any other. It can handshake a bunch of instances, but unless a user registers to the Super, they still need to search for them like they do now to introduce them to their own instance. A 'Super' may as well just be an instance deciding to put a Megathread of federated servers in its own Support community.
If the Super federates with a bunch of different instances, it also limits those instances abilities to defederate from each other. We'd end up with one of the following:
I'd suggest users subscribe to duplicates, for a few reasons (ultimately about federation and safety in redundancy).
1. Connectivity.
Until an instance first reaches out to introduce itself to another instance, communities are not visible. Somebody on lemmy.ml can look for 'gaming', but until somebody searches for !technology@beehaw.org to introduce lemmy.ml and beehaw.org to each other, then beehaw's communities like beehaw.org/c/gaming will not be in the results.
Having duplication helps communities find people across many instances. While it's true that one will likely get bigger than the other, people cross-posting in them or being active in both will allow them to act as bridges to each other, improving how instances network.
2. Longevity.
Lemmy is federated. That means we have dozens of different servers running in different homes, basements, hobbyist offices. It's not centralised, and they're passion projects. So not only is decided which instance should be the 'official' one meaningless, having at least two active somewhat-duplicates provides a level of redundancy if one of them shuts down. (Say, the owner dies, or goes bankrupt, or their office is hit my a natural disaster.)
3. Community.
So you raised the idea of each smaller community having duplicates. This is a problem for a platform that wants an aggregate that reaches as many as possible, such as a tech support community. But for social communities, the smaller ones have their own niche. You might not get as much volume in cat pictures (you can always sub to more cat subs if you wish) but the c/cats on your own instance is going to develop it own instance-specific community, where you know each others' cats by name. Hey @kittypaws@lemmy.meow, how is Madame Biscuits doing today? She seems to like her new bed!
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 #pokemon and #gaming 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.