We should implement this as whenever I wish to browse (for example) technology@lemmy.world I have to go to there, and whenever I wish to browse technology@kbin.social I have to go there. Would it be possible to implement it in kbin/lemmy’s code to make it easier to browse all?
Another kink to think about is what if you have different communities with the same name on different servers with completely different content. Like what if the trees subreddit came to a server and created a marijuana themed community called trees, but then another server wanted to discuss actual trees so they called theirs trees too. Wouldn’t want those two being grouped together automatically.
This feature shouldn’t be implemented on the server side or decided by the front end code, as the developers would have to decide which “same names” to merge. It’s the end user who should pick that.
It would better be a front end/app feature: The end user would pick communities from multiple servers (even ones with different names), and group them under whatever name/category they want. The front end would then show all posts/comments from that group as they were from a single community.
Additional feature: Automatically merge comments from cross-posts.
Looks like a great project. Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately I use /kbin :(
That would work with kbin magazines too as they are converted to /c/community@instance.tld on Lemmy side.
I think this is probably the only way to do it. But they need to be curated by someone. The reason it can’t happen automatically is based on how federation works on lemmy and kbin.
That is that an instance doesn’t know about the communities another instance has available (it doesn’t even know about any other instances). When a user specifically searches for a remote instance, then it contacts the instance and then knows about it.
But this change could work in that someone on the instance can search out the various communities and create the merged group.
Of course when you reply you’d only reply to the community that post was from but actually that’s fine because anyone in the combined group would still see it.
I just don’t think this is a problem which needs to be solved. On Reddit it’s common to have different subreddits focussed on the same topic. For example, r/Games and r/Gaming. The only difference on Lemmy is that they’re now m/Games@lemmy.world and m/Games@kbin.social. Yeah, it’s slightly longer, but super easy to solve using UX tweaks in the front end.
What’s more, this proliferation of communities across instances is critical for a reasonable user experience because of the apparent widespread support for defederating from instances which aren’t ideologically aligned. If people get comfortable with using one uber gaming community on one instance, that instance could disappear from one day to the next because of a capricious instance owner.
It’s much worse in Lemmy due its “federative” nature. For example, for “Dungeons&Dragons” - in reddit you have 9 subs in search, 2 of them are memes-related, 3 are “general” ones, 2 for DnD5e, 1 for DnD3.5 and 1 for UK people. They have clear distinction at least in their names, and sometimes have separate “theme”, like the one for 3.5 edition. In lemmy we already have 14, most of them have same name, literally letter to letter. And don’t forget that lemmy’s userbase is ~6000+ times less than reddit. People just continue to create new instances and same comminities, over and over.
There are dozens of D&D related subs on Reddit, and many of them overlap a great deal. There is nothing stopping people from creating as many D&D related subs as they like, and people have obviously done that. It’s just that you don’t visit the small ones because of a lack of content. I’m not seeing the practical distinction here. You’ll subscribe to the Lemmy communities with content and ignore the rest.
Let the competition in the marketplace thrive. Whoever is the stronger opponent will survive.
