I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
I think B is a good idea but I wonder how it would work. Maybe open an issue on github.
Doesn’t that go against Lemmy’s philosophy? I see where you’re coming from, and I agree there should be some way to find all related communities. But putting them all under the same umbrella makes all depend on the “meta-community” and its administration.
Well yes and no. I think the point is to avoid 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, or to help users find there niche for their town or interest so you aren’t left with multiple dead communities reposting questions all over the place hoping to find the community with the answer by sheer dunb luck while also thinking that Lemmy is dead.
Finding out that the official photography sub lives on glasgow.xyz is a big ask. So maybe it would be a good start to keep things fractured but allow an easy way to group them into a feed like the way multis work. Looking at my subscribed list is a horror show right now and I shudder to think of the infighting when three growing communities butt heads trying to spam each other’s users to grow there own. If I can organise my coms into categories and folders that would be a start. Maybe creating feeds by tag? And subscribing to tags?
Regarding the 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, I wonder about expecting hosts to monitor the communities they are hosting and removing them or archiving them in some way when they die. And if a host is not doing so, that could be considered poor moderation on their part. Not a complete solution, but maybe of help?
I think something like this would probably be done user side, maybe with some option to share it, much like the “multireddit” feature of reddit. Each individual community is still moderated and run by their mods and local instance, but the user can choose to aggregate multiple mags/communities together.
I was wondering the same thing. This is one of those double edge features. On the positive side if a community moderator is no good, or an instance is getting too big, there is the simple option to just make a new community on a different instance. The downside is having a bunch of duplicate small communities is not always a better option than one big centralized one.
I like the idea of super communities, but I am not sure that is even possible with the fediverse/lemmy. There might be some way to do this manually with instances dedicated to a certain topic, but that seems like it would be overkill. Also it would be interesting to see who would end up responsible for moderating the super community.
Maybe an option would be to have a virtual “parent” community, or a community group that communities can join. For example, the supercommunity “memes” could contain meme communities on different instances, aggregating posts and comments when queried. Posting would only be possible to a given community though.
This brings an issue with moderation however. If a participating community would be taken over and used to post spam, there would be no clear mechanism to exclude that community from the parent community. Perhaps it would be better if these parent communities where user curated, so the creator would add one or more communities to the parent, allowing other users to subscribe/unsubscribe from the parent at will.
Maybe treat it more like tags, and if a community within a tag is spamming a user can still hide that community independently.
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?
Are you aware of the community browser? Works great for finding communities across all instances
