piracy do not show the same content. This a problem.

A user checking out one of these URLs does not want to filter only local post on that instance.

On all instances, this url should mean "show me all /c/piracy on all federated instances"

If you really mean /c/piracy only on that instance, then add something to the url.

The current convention breaks the most important aspect of federation and makes its vestigial appendage.

The current way has user asking question /c/piracy, but on which instance ?

So now they'll all join the same instance . You wouldn't post anywhere else since no one would every see it.

It's a recipe for centralization.

I think this is obvious to most users, were deal with "voat with extra steps" here

39 comments

Here's what this sounds like to me:
george@aol.com and george@hotmail.com do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.
It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn't work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That's okay! It's okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!
There's no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.
Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it's really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user's first guess must be right.
- I have heard this meme before, lemmy is not email
  Also application that go against user intuition, start with a permanent handicap.
  But in this case, this is fatal, you cannot learn your way into making lemmy.example.com/c/piracy should you all /c/piracy on all instance
  The functionallity simply is missing and the consequence is everything will be on the lemmy.biginstance.com/c/thebigcommunity and everything else will be invisible (and probably defederated outright as moderation becomes increasingly untenable)
  
  I don't know about it. Look even at the usernames. It's @name@instance.addr, it's structured like an email. Even for instances, /c/piracy is not a thing, it is !piracy@lemmy.ml in Lemmy world. Even Mastadon has the same structure of name@instance.
  Every community has their own sets of rules, own set of moderators and culture. If you don't like how one is moderated, go to another one (basically how reddit works too, except there you need to change to name to make an alternate community)
  
  Technology skills don't work by intuition; they work by learning.
  People say "intuitive" when they mean "familiar to something I've already learned".
  For example, novice programmers often say that a programming language that resembles the first language they learned "is intuitive", while a language that looks different "is unintuitive".
  People who learned C first, used to argue that Python was "unintuitive" because it doesn't use {} curly braces around code blocks.
  That's not intuition. That's familiarity. Once they become familiar with Python, they no longer talk about the absence of {} around code blocks as "unintuitive".
  Here, there are users coming from centralized services like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. One of the things that they have to learn is that this is not a centralized service; you have to care about what instance you're looking at, or what instance a community is hosted on.

Remote communities do show the fully qualified community name in the url though. /c/piracy@instance.com should show the same thing on all instances.
- That requires you to keep and update a ledger of all existing /c/piracy communities and to visit each one in succession.
  An enormous and pointless task since all users have now realized "there's only one /c/piracy, it's on lemmy.ml" posting anywhere else is pointless as nobody will see it or even know they other place exists.
  If lemmy.example.com/c/piracy doesn't aglomerate all /c/piracy content from all federated instances automatically. Then the federation system is broken and pointless.

Silently combining communities, which may each have different content policies, is rife with potential for user confusion. Also, there's no guarantee that communities with the same name across servers have the same aims — to use your "piracy" example, c/piracy on one instance may be enthusiasts of literally sailing the seas wearing peg-legs and looting ships, or people who have sarcastically adopted the name for their fandom of those Johnny Depp movies, or something else entirely. Or your desired kind of piracy may take place in communities named differently across servers, whether it's due to someone else registering the community name first, local slang/translation, etc. Ironically, I think what you're asking for is a different type of centralization — centralization of namespace across servers.
The suggestion is interesting, but you may be expecting something out of Lemmy that it is not, as communities are individually hosted and managed. It does sound like there may be potential for Lemmy instances or client apps to allow a user to combine communities, multireddit-style, for their own personal usage. That would be cool and useful.
- This sounds like the /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts situation
  And I agree, a most sophisticated system would distinguish and agglomerate communities not just by their namespace but also their topic.
  But I think we have to be realistic and go for an expedient solution before reddit's moment of weakness if over.
  Reddit are coming here, discovering they have to hunt down which community is on which instance, this month.
  Most will just give up and go back to reddit when they realize lemmy is an agglomeration platform that does not agglomerate
  
  I think where we differ is whether Lemmy is pointless without truly distributed communities. I come down on the side of "it's not pointless" since there's a huge and growing install-base of mostly* compatible servers, clients and users that means the cost of switching communities is low, and the threat of switching may be enough to keep mods from implementing unpopular policies. More worrying to me is the admin of your home instance, where your identity is located, going rogue, getting hit by a bus, forgetting to pay their hosting bill, etc.
  *notwithstanding serious issues like defederation

It's the same as in reddit, you can find r/unpopularopinion and r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, or off my chest, or shower thoughts (with the UL one).
It'd be like asking those communities should only have one feed.
Similarly here you can have !piracy@lemmy.ml and !piracy@lemmy.world and you'd have to decide which one is more aligned with your idea of what the community should be.
And if you don't like it, then you can create a new community in another instance without having to fight for the same name (I could create one in my instance like !piracy@lemmy.pe1uca.dev)
- And if you post in piracy@lemmy.pe1uca.dev nobody will ever see it because they can only see, by default, what is on https://lemmy.theirinstance.com/c/piracy
  This IS the problem. It makes it nonsensical not to find the biggest community and post there. And second biggest gets the rejects, likes /r/truepiracy and the rest of the long tail will never be read by anyone, user who post there are probably just confused think that lemmy is not centralized
  
  ...all communities named "piracy" are not the same, the full community name technically includes the instance, they are each their own "subreddit." You could subscribe to all of them if you wish, or to just "the largest one," but you can think of them as say "lemmyworldpiracy" and "beehawpiracy" and so on, they are just different communities.
  It'd be like if two separate 15yo kids ran a fan page for their favorite anime character and expecting them to be identical simply because they are both about Goku, they're just different "sites" by different people, they just aren't the same thing simply because they're about the same topic.
  
  Again, it's the same in reddit, if you create a new sub no one can see it because reddit doesn't share what new communities there are, they're hidden from the search unless you know the exact name or until they have enough activity, but it's a cycle where you can't have enough activity because it doesn't appear in searches.
  The answer in both, reddit and lemmy, is crossposting, you need to promote your new community with good content.
  Or sharing it in communities like !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca or !lemmy411@lemmy.ca
  There's also this site, tho I don't know how it gets populated https://browse.feddit.de/

Is /trees for weed or arborists? Who moderates and decides? You have the same problem on that other site with things like /games vs /gaming vs /gamers vs true_gaming etc.
To me the bigger problem is discoverability. If there is nothing community at /piracy on my local instance something should ve done to show options of communities in the fediverse. Something like an integrated version of browse.feddit.de.
- I'm working on something similar at https://lemmyverse.net - I have plans for the future to allow client-side login to your own instance (so I don't see your password), but this depends on an upstream Lemmy backend change, which It appears servers will have to opt-into, but this may change (CORS *) 🤷‍♂️
- I think it has to be taken as a time
  First agglomerate all /c/piracy on all instances
  Then figure out how we would include /c/piracy /c/pirates /c/softwarepiracy
  That second one involves a human making choices, therefore bias, private interests, power seeking, censorship and control
  That second one is stepping into a bottomless quicksand pit

Jfc.

I've been saying this for a few days now, but alas! Downvoted, scoffed. I just don't get it. I am not advocating for anything other than true decentralization, which is broken in more than one way with the lemmyverse. Defederation is not even the issue. No, I don't want nazi communities. No, I don't have anything against admins. I just want to see the system work as it's touted to work. People are so protective of their communities, and rightfully so, but we need to think hard about the differences between moderation and exclusion. One can foster a safe community, the other will just isolate.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
- I also made one
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1674
  I see they tried the multireddit approach.
  But how do you make a multireddit of all instances, that's an impossible task to ask each and every single user to build on their own.
  It is too complicated and will likely remain a pie in the sky.
  Reddit implemented it but it required user action to use, so in practice it was as if it did not exist at all.
  I don't believe even 1% of current reddit users know this feature exists.
  Now imagine this on lemmy. You are posting to lemmy.reallyobscure3userinstance.com/c/piracy
  How many of the lemmy /c/piracy browsing user base would have the multireddit that could possibly even see you ? It's going to be a vanishingly small number.
  It would be the same as if the feature did not exist at all.
  
  I think #1113 is the best solution, but for the time being it's just a technical limitation of the platform unfortunately.

Thats one of the biggest issues. Its a big change of thinking from a centralised server like reddit etc.
All i want is to be able to group communities maybe call it a town even if its local only

This is going to happen a lot as Lemmy grows. There will be more communities with the same name over different instances. Though the full canonical name is the actual name of the community, not just the prefix name. For example !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !piracy@lemmy.ml are two different communities with two different names.
There's no federation wide rules about reusing the prefix name of a community. You can have as many repeats as people create. It's just the nature of how the decentralized architecture works. In other words you can't duplicate names on a particular instance, but the entire Fediverse doesn't care because it differentiates by instance name.
I have a number of duplicates I subscribe to and it's transparent when I look at the front page of subscribed communities. However I have to look at each duplicate individually when selecting a community to view. An option to look at communities in groups would be helpful. I think that's a reasonable feature to incorporate. It could be as simple as adding a checkbox to select more than one community to view at a time.
I don't think it will ever be possible to physically merge communities across multiple instances at a base level. It's likely something that exceeds scope of design.

I love this idea. You should put it up as a recommendation on the lemmy GitHub if it's not there already.
- Another user posted similar issues Those issues attempt for a "multireddit" like compromise feature 818 1113
  So I made a "communities must be aggregated" non compromise bug report instead
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1674
  The more I read, the more I think ideological beliefs about controlling speech will prevent this from happening. Moderators want centralization so there can be one throat to choke.
  
  It wont matter if the implement it at the instance level to at least allow grouping or "Towns" as I said above
- I'm not sure how to word it. Also, it's so blindingly obvious that I'm starting to think this is a ideologically motivated decision to prevent community aggregation on purpose (to force communities to concentrate on single instances, giving the owner of that instance leverage over the community?)

I like the idea, but it should be opt-in. So communities can decide if they want to "combine" with other communities. And I would go a step further and not force exact naming schemes.
- But why? They could just agree on one and delete the other one. What ist the benefit of having topic@example and topic@otherexample when both show the same content?
- It should be opt-out, the default should be content is federated. And it is already opt-out, that is what defederation is. Of course defederation is a blunt tool. Defederation should be possible on a per-community basis.
  Also, what most mods want from deferation is not "we don't want to be heard by others" but "we don't want outsiders to be allowed to speak here" which is different.
  Although I just noticed that posts are not stored in their communities but as sequential numbers on their instance.
  like https://lemmy.example/com/post/1579555
  If that reflects the internal structure, then disallowing outside from posting in one community but not another is going to be a ton of extra programming.
  And I would also like to see people posting comments in https://lemmy.another.com/post/1579555
  then from https://lemmy.thirdinstance.com/post/1579555 you would see comments from example.com and another.com as if they were one.

39 comments