We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST
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.
Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
We have an open issue for collections of communities, but not for any complicated trees of communities. Creating and linking community trees sounds really complicated, and I don't know how all that would work.
I don't know how the code is currently working, but I like this feature idea and would suggest to start very simple and proceed from there.
For example you could:
a) Make a list of communities that are siblings with their id and instance
b) add a toggle to view sister community posts yes /no
c) query all communities, list the last x posts from each with time constraints, e.g. not older than 1 day or hour depending on the community post frequency
d) list them sorted by time of x , depending on what was chosen
The biggest issue I see with this simple approach, besides others, is that different communities are different in terms of activity / post frequency. So ideally the better, but more effort, way would be to let each community instance communicate their posts themselves via a query with activity metric parameters. Basically the amount of returned posts would depend on common parameters set by the most active instance.
It's not yet thought out, but just getting an mvp started and test the waters would probably be better than having it perfect right away while working on it for months