Yeah seeing same article about american politics posted cross half dozen communities on different instances really is killing my feed.

I like the idea. I suspect it would make moderation a challenge but it sounds pretty useful

On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone's All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.

To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I'm not sure if there's a good way to fix that issue.

There is a really interesting dev discussion on this topic here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033

There are requests for this in the works. If I didn't have almost 1000 comments I would find the links but there's no search function for comments :/

Ah I found it!

https://lemmy.world/post/318115

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/149

NO.

Once again, I don’t feel like people quite understand the big picture. They see an issue and resort to old, simplified solutions that are designed to solve problems on non fediverse platforms.

Options we want options! We don’t want to hard code things one way or another. We want data and APIs, then it’s up the client to put it together in way that makes sense.

I’m all for adding a category “tag” on a community to further the ability to organize a feed. But it should be up to the user/client to decide to allow / group s show the communities in a pleasing way. DO NOT FORCE THINGS INTO PEOPLES FEED.

These “ideas” that people keep coming up with are nice and start good discussions, but most of them keep trying and to force fediverse apps into being reddit , twitter or whatever else.

No, then there is no point to Lemmy being federated at all.

Better to just have each community develop their own flavor on the same topic imo

Who moderates it?

I agree with this 100%. It would also help with QOL since I won't need to follow a bunch of the same communities spread out over numerous instances.

Gotta say I like merged communities better than just multireddits. The problem we're trying to solve is that one community of 1000 people is more than 10x better than 10 communities with 100 people, because instead of a bunch of posts or comments with less than 5 upvotes you get true content curation.

Would have to be voluntary and maybe there could be two levels, one where mods can only mod what is "truly" posted to their instance, and another where any mod can moderate anything in the combined community.

I like the idea of a distributed community where everyone can see posts from any other instance they federate with.

You could have two types of community, one federated local and one federated global, and the former acts like current communities, and the latter would act like a big pot everyone throws stuff into, and local instance mods could set which instances to accept and deny posts and comments from, and which instances to federate moderation actions from

I think a more reasonable approach would be client side. I haven’t thought out the implementation but I’m sure if you brought it to the attention of some devs that have clients they’d be open to the idea.

Each lemmy Server should've been it's own subreddit.

This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post.

I thought that’s more or less how it’s supposed to work now: if someone on instance A subscribes to a community on instance B, the community gets cached on instance A; and users there can post to it locally (and see each other’s posts) even if it temporarily can’t re-sync with instance B.

Is that now how it works in practice?

Good idea but this will lead to even more centralization if it's decided by the instances who their communities federates with.

The top ones will federate and leave the small instances out of the loop. Or put demands on other instances they have to fulfill to be part of the community federation.

It all ends up similar to Reddit in the end. Maybe it's unavoidable and we cant have properly decentralized now when it's centralized.

I agree. For the people that dont want to see your home feed cluttered with duplicate content, it may be time to just start subscribing to your favorite Lemmy communities using RSS feeds for more control.

There's an RSS feed for anything on Lemmy using Open RSS. For instance, the RSS feed for this community is here:

https://openrss.org/lemmy.world/c/fediverse

You can also get feeds for comments on specific posts.

Not something I'm interested in.

My instance aggressively defends the rights of trans folk and other minorities, so the moderators and the admins of any communities based on our instance will come down hard on transphobes and the like.

That's just not true of most of the rest of the threadiverse though, which means that merging just wouldn't work

There is one major problem with the implementation that I hope you can understand with an example. Suppose there are three forums - motorsports@example1.com, motorsports@example2.net and motorsports@example3.org, which eventually start mirroring each other by default. Let's also suppose that a user is, for whatever reason, banned from example1.com but not from example2.net or example3.org. Should the user try to subscribe to motorsports@example2.net, must the latter honor the ban list from example1.com and ban the user as well, or should each instance have its own ban list, knowing well that users can evade bans by subscribing to another of the mirrored communities?

Maybe the solution is more on the client side. An app should be able to let the user add communities from different instances and present them as one, maybe even merge comments from identical posts etc. Then if the user gets fed up with some instance not moderating or spamming, the user could then just remove that from his multi list.

Technically there's no way to please everyone on this, but there's also no reason why the apps couldn't present a meta-view of what is actually happening across instances, if that's what the user prefers. Most users don't want to see the gears turn.

In addition to the user experience it would also minimize any "damages" from any instance going down, because the multi list would remain active as long as any of the instances are up.

Federation already solves the issue you have. If every user subscribed to every instance of /c/cats, then they would all see every post and could comment on each of them. There's nothing gained by having another level of federation other than making it slightly easier to subscribe to all of them at once.

Personally, I'd rather see user-controlled "multireddits", but better. You group together any number of communities and give the group a name. Then make it easy to publish the group as a link that others can view and import into their account.

All we really need is any easy way for people to subscribe to multiple instance of "cats" with one tap. (And to unsubscribe just as easily). I think the best way to do this is with user-driven, sharable community groups.

For example, I could make a group that includes "cats", "kittens", "jellybean toes", "cat photos", "cat bellies", "chonkers", and whatever else. They don't even need to have the same name. Then I can share that somewhere. Mods could put popular groupings in sidebars. Fediverse websites could have whole lists of popular groupings.

Plus you could have an additional feature: Lemmy could let you view one of your groups as a feed, just like you currently can view "Subscribed", "Local", or "Everything". Sometimes you just want to see cat photos and not be bothered by world news or politics.