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?
Another kink to think about is what if you have different communities with the same name on different servers with completely different content. Like what if the trees subreddit came to a server and created a marijuana themed community called trees, but then another server wanted to discuss actual trees so they called theirs trees too. Wouldn’t want those two being grouped together automatically.
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 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.
Doesn’t it place higher the communities that are on the same instance as the user?
Theoretically it shows the communities with the highest subscriber count first.
Right now tho it seems, that Lemmy is bad at fetching the real subscriber counts of other instances. For example I get this result, when searching for Linux on this account right now.
Every sub-count besides the one of my home-instance is terribly outdated, thus it favors the home-instance community. This is probably not the intent of the developers tho.
I’m currently using Connect (the android App) and search is even funkier, to the point where it order is frankly random, and it appears to only show “famous” instances or the ones I’m subscribed to at least a community.
I know this isn’t intended, but I can’t help but feel that if sync was possible, this wouldn’t be a noticible issue
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.
Alright but what if there was an active community that moved to a self hosted one? Wouldn’t that still show the older community first?
This feature shouldn’t be implemented on the server side or decided by the front end code, as the developers would have to decide which “same names” to merge. It’s the end user who should pick that.
It would better be a front end/app feature: The end user would pick communities from multiple servers (even ones with different names), and group them under whatever name/category they want. The front end would then show all posts/comments from that group as they were from a single community.
Additional feature: Automatically merge comments from cross-posts.
I just don’t think this is a problem which needs to be solved. On Reddit it’s common to have different subreddits focussed on the same topic. For example, r/Games and r/Gaming. The only difference on Lemmy is that they’re now m/Games@lemmy.world and m/Games@kbin.social. Yeah, it’s slightly longer, but super easy to solve using UX tweaks in the front end.
What’s more, this proliferation of communities across instances is critical for a reasonable user experience because of the apparent widespread support for defederating from instances which aren’t ideologically aligned. If people get comfortable with using one uber gaming community on one instance, that instance could disappear from one day to the next because of a capricious instance owner.
It’s much worse in Lemmy due its “federative” nature. For example, for “Dungeons&Dragons” - in reddit you have 9 subs in search, 2 of them are memes-related, 3 are “general” ones, 2 for DnD5e, 1 for DnD3.5 and 1 for UK people. They have clear distinction at least in their names, and sometimes have separate “theme”, like the one for 3.5 edition. In lemmy we already have 14, most of them have same name, literally letter to letter. And don’t forget that lemmy’s userbase is ~6000+ times less than reddit. People just continue to create new instances and same comminities, over and over.
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.
I think this is probably the only way to do it. But they need to be curated by someone. The reason it can’t happen automatically is based on how federation works on lemmy and kbin.
That is that an instance doesn’t know about the communities another instance has available (it doesn’t even know about any other instances). When a user specifically searches for a remote instance, then it contacts the instance and then knows about it.
But this change could work in that someone on the instance can search out the various communities and create the merged group.
Of course when you reply you’d only reply to the community that post was from but actually that’s fine because anyone in the combined group would still see it.
