A user checking out one of these URLs does not want to filter only local post on that instance.
On all instances, this url should mean “show me all /c/piracy on all federated instances”
If you really mean /c/piracy only on that instance, then add something to the url.
The current convention breaks the most important aspect of federation and makes its vestigial appendage.
The current way has user asking question /c/piracy, but on which instance ?
So now they’ll all join the same instance . You wouldn’t post anywhere else since no one would every see it.
It’s a recipe for centralization.
I think this is obvious to most users, were deal with “voat with extra steps” here
Here’s what this sounds like to me:
george@aol.comandgeorge@hotmail.comdo not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email togeorge, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.
It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn’t work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That’s okay! It’s okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!
There’s no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.
Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it’s really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user’s first guess must be right.
I have heard this meme before, lemmy is not email
Also application that go against user intuition, start with a permanent handicap.
But in this case, this is fatal, you cannot learn your way into making lemmy.example.com/c/piracy should you all /c/piracy on all instance
The functionallity simply is missing and the consequence is everything will be on the lemmy.biginstance.com/c/thebigcommunity and everything else will be invisible (and probably defederated outright as moderation becomes increasingly untenable)
I don’t know about it. Look even at the usernames. It’s @name@instance.addr, it’s structured like an email. Even for instances, /c/piracy is not a thing, it is !piracy@lemmy.ml in Lemmy world. Even Mastadon has the same structure of name@instance.
Every community has their own sets of rules, own set of moderators and culture. If you don’t like how one is moderated, go to another one (basically how reddit works too, except there you need to change to name to make an alternate community)
This is like saying Bob in New York and Bob in Austin as different
Therefore for this reason /c/knitting in Seattle and /c/knitting in De Leon Springs are different things that must be considered individually in their own terms.
Nobody wants to distinguish and reads individually about the 108000 knitting communities in the USA. There is only /c/knitting, the rest is hair splitting and exposed infrastructure
Technology skills don’t work by intuition; they work by learning.
People say “intuitive” when they mean “familiar to something I’ve already learned”.
For example, novice programmers often say that a programming language that resembles the first language they learned “is intuitive”, while a language that looks different “is unintuitive”.
People who learned C first, used to argue that Python was “unintuitive” because it doesn’t use {} curly braces around code blocks.
That’s not intuition. That’s familiarity. Once they become familiar with Python, they no longer talk about the absence of {} around code blocks as “unintuitive”.
Here, there are users coming from centralized services like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. One of the things that they have to learn is that this is not a centralized service; you have to care about what instance you’re looking at, or what instance a community is hosted on.
Remote communities do show the fully qualified community name in the url though. /c/piracy@instance.com should show the same thing on all instances.
That requires you to keep and update a ledger of all existing /c/piracy communities and to visit each one in succession.
An enormous and pointless task since all users have now realized “there’s only one /c/piracy, it’s on lemmy.ml” posting anywhere else is pointless as nobody will see it or even know they other place exists.
If lemmy.example.com/c/piracy doesn’t aglomerate all /c/piracy content from all federated instances automatically. Then the federation system is broken and pointless.
Silently combining communities, which may each have different content policies, is rife with potential for user confusion. Also, there’s no guarantee that communities with the same name across servers have the same aims — to use your “piracy” example, c/piracy on one instance may be enthusiasts of literally sailing the seas wearing peg-legs and looting ships, or people who have sarcastically adopted the name for their fandom of those Johnny Depp movies, or something else entirely. Or your desired kind of piracy may take place in communities named differently across servers, whether it’s due to someone else registering the community name first, local slang/translation, etc. Ironically, I think what you’re asking for is a different type of centralization — centralization of namespace across servers.
The suggestion is interesting, but you may be expecting something out of Lemmy that it is not, as communities are individually hosted and managed. It does sound like there may be potential for Lemmy instances or client apps to allow a user to combine communities, multireddit-style, for their own personal usage. That would be cool and useful.
This sounds like the /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts situation
And I agree, a most sophisticated system would distinguish and agglomerate communities not just by their namespace but also their topic.
But I think we have to be realistic and go for an expedient solution before reddit’s moment of weakness if over.
Reddit are coming here, discovering they have to hunt down which community is on which instance, this month.
Most will just give up and go back to reddit when they realize lemmy is an agglomeration platform that does not agglomerate
I think where we differ is whether Lemmy is pointless without truly distributed communities. I come down on the side of “it’s not pointless” since there’s a huge and growing install-base of mostly* compatible servers, clients and users that means the cost of switching communities is low, and the threat of switching may be enough to keep mods from implementing unpopular policies. More worrying to me is the admin of your home instance, where your identity is located, going rogue, getting hit by a bus, forgetting to pay their hosting bill, etc.
*notwithstanding serious issues like defederation
It’s the same as in reddit, you can find r/unpopularopinion and r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, or off my chest, or shower thoughts (with the UL one).
It’d be like asking those communities should only have one feed.
Similarly here you can have !piracy@lemmy.ml and !piracy@lemmy.world and you’d have to decide which one is more aligned with your idea of what the community should be.
And if you don’t like it, then you can create a new community in another instance without having to fight for the same name (I could create one in my instance like !piracy@lemmy.pe1uca.dev)
And if you post in piracy@lemmy.pe1uca.dev nobody will ever see it because they can only see, by default, what is on https://lemmy.theirinstance.com/c/piracy
This IS the problem. It makes it nonsensical not to find the biggest community and post there. And second biggest gets the rejects, likes /r/truepiracy and the rest of the long tail will never be read by anyone, user who post there are probably just confused think that lemmy is not centralized
…all communities named “piracy” are not the same, the full community name technically includes the instance, they are each their own “subreddit.” You could subscribe to all of them if you wish, or to just “the largest one,” but you can think of them as say “lemmyworldpiracy” and “beehawpiracy” and so on, they are just different communities.
It’d be like if two separate 15yo kids ran a fan page for their favorite anime character and expecting them to be identical simply because they are both about Goku, they’re just different “sites” by different people, they just aren’t the same thing simply because they’re about the same topic.
Again, it’s the same in reddit, if you create a new sub no one can see it because reddit doesn’t share what new communities there are, they’re hidden from the search unless you know the exact name or until they have enough activity, but it’s a cycle where you can’t have enough activity because it doesn’t appear in searches.
The answer in both, reddit and lemmy, is crossposting, you need to promote your new community with good content.
Or sharing it in communities like !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca or !lemmy411@lemmy.ca
There’s also this site, tho I don’t know how it gets populated https://browse.feddit.de/
Is /trees for weed or arborists? Who moderates and decides? You have the same problem on that other site with things like /games vs /gaming vs /gamers vs true_gaming etc.
To me the bigger problem is discoverability. If there is nothing community at /piracy on my local instance something should ve done to show options of communities in the fediverse. Something like an integrated version of browse.feddit.de.
I’m working on something similar at https://lemmyverse.net - I have plans for the future to allow client-side login to your own instance (so I don’t see your password), but this depends on an upstream Lemmy backend change, which It appears servers will have to opt-into, but this may change (CORS *) 🤷♂️
I think it has to be taken as a time
First agglomerate all /c/piracy on all instances
Then figure out how we would include /c/piracy /c/pirates /c/softwarepiracy
That second one involves a human making choices, therefore bias, private interests, power seeking, censorship and control
That second one is stepping into a bottomless quicksand pit
