This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.
What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don’t see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
Is this link supposed to work?
No, it’s a fictional instance used to make a point.
Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.