7h ago

Link communities across multiple instances?

I am not very familiar with the technical workings of lemmy, so if this is a really shitty idea, just tell me.

I joined lemmy a week ago and it kind of bothered me that there is not THE me_irl or not THE programming_humor. Would it be possible to add the functionality to link communities together. In my naive opinion, this would solve my "problem" and add the opportunity to not only federate reddit, but to also federate single communities on lemmy.

What would be the pros and cons of such an approach? Looking forward for your comments!

8 comments

Piefed already does this to a certain extent. Take a look at the topics: https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft
It allows each community to stay "independent" but also have their posts come up in one big feed.

Those communities are all on different websites. Different websites, with different user-bases, and different governing rules. They are not the same space, in any way, shape, or form, and you should not imagine them to be.
There's no need to want them to be, either. Content of interest to one will likely be of interest to the others, and will find its way to them. Content that is only of interest to one but not the others does not need to be seen by all.
Let go of the FOMO. It's not serving you.

This is not a bug in Lemmy, it's a feature.

One problem with that, is not all instances are federated. That is the beauty of lemmy being decentralized is that there can be multiple instances of a community. See the drama regarding !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone vs !196@lemmy.world vs whatever the other one was.
Some users prefer specific instances over others. I try to avoid .world and .ml communities when possible because of their typically heavy handed moderation, instead opting for smaller communities and instances.

There have been discussions about this in the Lemmy Github repo issues. Latest info AFAIK is that this feature is waiting for some volunteer to implement it. Current developers said that they are busy with other features.
But yes, this is something that I would also like to see very much. Allowing same-topic communities to connect would be good for whole Fediverse.
- there is some interesting discussion of the problem and possible solutions (including links to github issues) in this blog post: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/
  
  Ugh. The idea that there are two forums with the same name on different websites focused on similar topics isn't a "community separation problem". The "community" is not separated. There are just separate communities discussing similar things.

I think this is being worked on / discussed in the background for how to best implement this. There are a lot of complications when you get into the details of how it should work
In the meantime, another perspective is that even on centralized platforms there will be multiple communities for a particular theme. Especially at first, there may be a few communities for something before one of them will win out as THE community for it.
That's already happened here for a few communities, where there is ONE main community for a topic.
For others, it's still in the early stages or (like on Reddit) there are multiple concurrent communities for ideological reasons.
The exception would be if something is created or thought of on the platform, in which case there may only be one community for it from the start. For example, !taneggs@lemmy.ca was a fun idea that started here and has grown into a solid community now (thanks to @DaMonsterKnees@lemmy.world's regular posts 😊).

8 comments