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?
It would be cool, if communities about similar topics could decide to “federate” among each other, thus creating a combined feed of all these combined.
This is an issue I’ve been wondering about, the Technology example is fine, but the real edge case IMO is Official Communities.
Like, let’s say I have an Android App and want to migrate my official community to Lemmy. I could build a community in:
- A big and general instance to gather more users, like Lemmy.World.
- A big but themed instance, like Lemdro.id. It has a smaller number of users but they are more likely to be interested in my App
- I could make my own instance, which would allow me to dedicate communities into topics and I would have more control over it, which is good cause it is an official community.
I feel there should be a way for “sync” communities in those cases. It makes sense in those cases to allow a full sync, with the option to unsync if things go south and there’s a split.
I think for official communities self-hosted instances feels like a win-win for everyone. Companies get full control of their community but no one has to participate with it in isolation. They can also separate discussions, eg news@pokemon.com or blueprints@factorio.com.
For more abstract themed communities lime technology it’s definitely more complex. Reddit’s partial solution is multi-subreddits which could apply here but it’s far from a complete solution.
The issue with that is that an user could be on a popular instance, like lemmy.world or a related one like lemdroid, and search for a community on it. They could find a ghost community that was created unofficially before the self-hosted one. In that case they could think this is it and there’s no real discussion to be had on Lemmy.
It is also slightly weird because there’s an incentive for developers to grab the appname@popular.instance to ensure they can use the name and link it to the official instance. But that also leaves a ton of pretty much barren communities.
That’s why I think keeping in sync would be a good feature, keep all communities in sync with the official one so that users aren’t lost.
That said, this only works for official communities, and maybe(huge maybe) regional communities that have a self hosted instance
The practical solution for that, is to simply search the topic you are interested in plus lemmy on google. Chances are best that you will find the most active community.
Since reddit’s search feature was completely unusable for the majority of its history, for me that is just “business as usual”. Though it would be nice to have a more integrated solution.
The search function typically lists the biggest communities first, so the likelihood that a user will encounter a barren community first, is probably not that high.
You engage with the communities you prefer, just like at the other place. Some will be more active, some will have better posts, some will have better people, some will be more specialized to what you’re interested in, and you engage in those.
İt’s very difficult. It will be a feature of uniting/separating communities. This will only visually show the groups as a whole. We will also be able to name this group. In this way, we will be able to see the content on similar topics in different instances as a whole.
Meta-communities in two flawors:
- user/UI-based, where the user can create an entry in his preferences, add a bunch of communities there and set which one will be its “facade”. The main “con” here that every single user should do a lot of work by himself
- server-based, where you can create new meta-community, add your own community there, and send invites to all similar communities to join. Every community that joined could(should?) be removed from discovery, but be visible as “nested”. Search by its name should lead to meta-community. Ownership of meta-community should belong to its members in term that not a single one could delete it or make any harm. Meta-community exists while there’s at least one member in it.
Important part that one to be careful about combining feeds. Small cozy community can just dissolve in valley of posts from much larger one. The thing is controversial, on one hand it’s really handy to see all the posts all at once, on the other hand - it can kill smaller communities, as their creators will lose the sense and desire to have them maintained. There are different solutions:
