So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.
How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.
Shit, is this not how Lemmy is intended to work already? I’d assumed this was part of it being “federated.” Clearly I have some things to learn.
I too had presumed that there was going to be a way to federate communities across instances into one feed, based on the mutual agreement of course.
I mean, right now federation is in its infancy so more advanced federation options haven’t really been implemented, and this isn’t something you want done by default, because two communities focusing on different things might have the same name. For example, “trees” might be referring to cannabis (a joke that originated on Reddit), or a biology community about actual trees.
Makes sense not to do it by default, but I think the option to form a single coherent community across servers is crucial to avoiding platform-killing fragmentation. Otherwise what’s even the point of being “federated?” It’s just a bunch of separate servers.
You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml. This is what federation was always about.
What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms. Federated content is AFAIK already replicated on the connected server, so it seems feasible to implement something like that, but there are probably some details in the ActivityPub specs that make it difficult to do so (for example: I think AP does not allow substituting the sender).
the problem here is discoverability! as it stands in all Fediverse projects fewer instances host the majority of the fediverse users. because without being able to discover threads of other instances from the one you signed-up to, those smaller communities will not be active enough and will end up duying.
We must think of ways of merging the feed form different communities of different instances so the user feels like interacting with one big universe rather than separate communities.
Sure, but again I come back to the question of, what’s the point of being federated then? I may as well just be using a local client to present me with a set of RSS feeds from different websites or something.
And that’s how I’d assumed Lemmy was going to work until I saw this post. It seems intuitive to me that subs of the same name would at least have the option to “sync” across servers.
Why would !main@startrek.com be synced in any way with !main@starwars.com ? They have nothing to do with each other. Communities should stand on their own, and it should be the users choice which federated communities they subscribe to.
Interesting, I hadn’t contemplated the idea of topic-dedicated servers. So looking at multiple servers through lemmy.ml is functionally equivalent to using a local client to pull the data from each server separately. I don’t think that’s a bad idea, it’s just not what I’d assumed.
As I said in my initial post, clearly I have some things to learn! I’m not a programmer, just a superuser with an interest in finding an alternative to Reddit’s increasingly invasive and restrictive platform.
That said, I do still like the idea of giving subs the option to “merge” if so desired. It’s an interesting layer of complexity to add on top of what I’m realizing is already a fairly complex system.
Small nit: it’s not like pulling data from each server separately because you can have one user account on one server and vote / comment / post in communities on all the servers using that one same identity.
So what’s the role of the server in account creation/maintenance? Others could take the name “Flelk” on other servers and parade around pretending to be me, meaning readers have to check the domain name to confirm whether it really is me? If my “home” server deletes my account, does that erase all my votes, comments, and posts on just my “home” server, or on all servers?
(I know you folks are busy actually building this thing, so if there are better ways to get answers to these questions other than asking you admins directly, please feel free to point me in that direction.)
then what’s the point of lemmy? a federated community is in a sense centralizing communication through multiple isolated servers. if each one is isolated from the other, and we have 10 different discussion hubs focusing on !chocolatecakes@cooking.com, !chocolatecakes@cookies.com etc, then the community is severely fractured and lemmy as a platform doesn’t work as it doesn’t take advantage of the integration at all. for it to work as a platform, cooking.com should be able to choose if it wish to include !chocolatecakes@cookies.com.
The point is you can follow federated communities from any server. Not that those communities are “shared” by several instances. What you’re talking about isn’t federated, it’s merging. Does mastodon let you merge users across instances?
precisely, so a !main@startrek.com community makes very little sense for how communities are integrated through federation, a !startrek@mywebsite.com makes a lot more sense, but when there is a !startrek@mywebsite.com and a !startrek@yourwebsite.com you’ve fractured the community if both lemmy servers are federated. a !tng@mywebsite.com and a !ds9@yourwebsite.com makes more sense. you can’t really compare it to how mastodon as it’s an entirely different type of community platform.