1y ago

We should have something like federated communities

Communities on different instances about the same topic should have the option to essentially federate so a post on one appears on all of them and opening any of them shows you the comments from all of them. 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. Federation could be decided by the community mods and the comments can have a little “/c/communityname@instance.name” on it so you know which community the comment was originally posted on.

96 comments

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
- This was the idea behind MultiReddits if I'm not mistaken. In which case a simple operator like:
  Fediverse@lemmy.world +Fediverse@lemmy.ml
  Could get baked into the Lemmy core to allow this to work.
  
  I asked the Lemmy devs about multi-reddits type subscribing and they said that it's on their list but they need help developing it because they have a huge list. I like the multiereddits way because then the user decides and there isn't extra mods (managers) sprinkled in.
  
  That's still just two separate communities. Like a filter. That's fine. That's not what OP is suggesting though. What OP is suggesting is much more extreme.
  
  What are MultiReddits and how do they work?
- If all federated communities could decide upon to regulate same rules, every one of them could be moderated by their own moderators. But the problem I see here is the things that's being federated is in reality server itself which means it would be impossible(not sure but at least not necessary) to do such a thing. But anyone can easily build an app to collect posts from same communities, it does not require to play with activitypub, just lemmy api.

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

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.
- Keeping communities separate is the simplest way to go, tbh. Sharing karma could lead to weird brigades, like r/ScreenshotsAreHard cross-posting from every picture of screens on the Fediverse and then mass-downvoting from there.
  To me, the best solution would be to implement multireddits. That way, you can have your cat multilemmy of 100 communities without affecting your main feed, but you could also do the same for related or identical communities. Plus, moderators could create a multilemmy and display it prominently in their sidebar.
  Being able to subscribe to a multi would solve that issue
  
  I agree that my idea probably wouldn't be great, for the reasons we both stated. While multicommunities are a good idea, I'm not sure they address the specific issue bothering me either, of crossposts spamming the All feed. OP's idea might help with that a little - but honestly, I just think the 'Hot' algorithm needs some more fine tuning, and perhaps custom logic to avoid showing duplicates.
  
  Wouldn't a multilemmy still run into an issue where duplicate posts or cross posts show up multiple times in a feed?

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
- How would this be any different then how it works now? Banned users would still be banned on your instance
  
  Different than*
  But it actually should be different from.
- That's an important and valid concern. What if the community federation could allow mods on your instance to ban users from other instances? You'd not see that user's posts or comments when viewing a community from your instance. The downside is that your mods would have more work.
  
  Not enough. The idea is to fuck the transphobes off so that they're not welcome in the group, not to give them space to harass some of the members instead of all of the members.
- Oh no someone has a different opinion than you REEEE permaban the "transphobic".
  Welcome to the bubble.
  
  Exhibit A
  
  you are an example of why they're so strict about it

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.
- Maybe you can subscribe to "news" and it gives you a submenu where you can tick which instances you want to include in your own selection of "news" community.
  It still leaves the question of how it deals with crossposts of the same article to multiple instances.
- You're absolutely right! Easy and simple fix, which does not require any more decision rights, or extra responsibilities, being given to the instance operators.

No, and the difference between Beehw and Lemmy.world is why. Different people have different views about moderation and what is acceptable content.
There are two solutions to the real problem of duplicate content:
Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
Making crossposting a reference to the original post, not a copy. Mods would need to be able to block crossposts from specific communities, and remove crossposts to their sub.
- These are solvable technical issues.
  If community mods on different servers saw they have similar moderation guidelines, they could agree to federate. If they diverge in the future or disagree, they could defederate. Just like instances can defederate from previously federated servers today. It would be no more or less disruptive than defederation is today.
  Heck, if done thoughtfully, it could even allow cross moderation, multiplying the number of mods for like-minded communities. The only mods who wouldn't appreciate that are the egotistical, power hungry, Redditish mods.
  
  If the mods can agree on policy, there is absolutely no reason to have two communities. Shut one down and use the other.
  Edit: can someone explain to me what the difference between synchronizing two communities and subscribing to a federated community is? I mean, that’s exactly the point of federation.

This is a really good idea. Multi-instance communities would not just provide content redundancy, but also some load balancing. Each multi-instance community would become it's own little CDN. Duplicating the data across instances does pose a problem of bloat, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

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
- All 3 of those links are broken. For some reason you put [1], [2] or [3] in each URL.
  https://lemmy.world/post/318115
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
  https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/149
  
  I just copied them from my comment..
  Now your urls have the same thing!
  Is it just me?

Each lemmy Server should've been it's own subreddit.
- Definitely not.
  For every individual community you would have to pay for a domain, maintain the instance, keep it updated, keeping it secure, and keeping it paid. That's really difficult already with a single server, let alone multiple for multiple servers and domains. These are also more points where data from other servers can be cached and get hacked/leaked or outright incompatible Lemmy versions.
  It'd also still have the problem of multiple communities with the same topic, so it's not solving anything.
  How do you expect people to migrate to Lemmy if these are the ridiculous hoops they're expected to do to start a community. Instead, they can just go to reddit and click a "create subreddit" button instead. What option do you think they'd choose?
  
  Well, can't you just go to a Lemmy server and click "create community"?
  
  How do you expect people to migrate to lemmy when you have the five thousand people split amongst ten servers with world news
- I've had that thought too- it would guarantee instance owners are dedicated to making one community as awesome as they can, but at the same time the current structure means non-technically inclined people are able to have a home off-Reddit as long as their values align with the instance owner.
  That said, Startrek.website is kinda doing a focused-topic thing with different communities and rules within to achieve different goals working with the same subject matter. I think it could serve as a good model for themed instances.
- It still could
- Its* own
  
  🤓

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
- I mostly agree with this, but I also think there should be some way of being able to collate the same 5 communities on 5 different instances under 1 view. I said this when I first came onto the Fediverse, but maybe having a tagging system for each instance would allow for both; users could look up instances with, say, a “news” tag and get every instance with that tag - and this way, the communities would still be separate and can develop differently from one another.
  
  Just make it like multireddits on Reddit. It allows you to collate multiple communities into one feed.

Who moderates it?
- If communities have agreed to federate with each other, mod status should federate and mods of any of the federated communities should be able to moderate any content.
  If it's one way (e.g. !technology@lemmy.world absorbs content from !technology@lemmy.ml but not the other way around) then the absorbing instance lemmy.world can moderate all content but it doesn't federate to lemmy.ml.
  
  The problem with this was given by one of the lemmy devs—imagine @news on a tech focused instance and @news on a star trek focused instance, they are not going to have any crossover of content as they're effectively entirely different communities.
  Similar would happen with local language differences like @football or @chips on an American vs a British instance
  Although as a Brit I would completely be here for the chaos of that second scenario
  
  i can't decide if a one-way-moderation-scheme-type-thingy like that is beautifully simple solution, or one fraught with annoying hidden complications lol that's a sick idea.
  
  I don't know that one-way solves the problem...you could "Absorb content" with an overzealous user or a bot. It wouldn't subscribe the .world and .ml users to the same community.
  Ideally you want someone to be able to subscribe to !technology@all or something.

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?
- They can have their own ban lists and users on the instance as the banned user won’t see the same banned users posts just like how federation works now
  
  Alright, but should the banned user be able to see posts from the banned instance if they're cross-posted to a non-banned instance?

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.

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.

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 not how it works in practice?

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 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.

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.

Yes power mods should be able to eat up keywords across the community. And I'm sure they various admins will all agree how to handle these communities once they don't like what's being posted.

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.

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.
- I like this idea and it sounds easy to implement without changing underlying infrastructure.
  It would be nice being able to publish communities I follow and check out other people feeds, not only similar communities'
- I still don't get what the point is of multiple instances with the same communities. Your proposal is a fix for a problem that doesnt need to exist IMO. Just have one thematic community be on one specific instance, and a community for a different topic on a different instance
  
  Any instance could go down forever at any point. Should all cat photos ever posted to Lemmy be on one instance? Hell no.
  Besides, my idea is about combining any communities into a group. They could be duplicates like you're assuming, or just closely related, like cat communities. Or I could group together several different sports teams communities into one feed to let me just view those communities when I feel like it.

You can already view a community from any instance. Just subscribe to communities you want. Support more and smaller instances of you want more decentralization. Lemmy.world going down taking out so many communities with it is a problem of too much being hosted there. Everything you're describing basically already exists. It would be very silly to force communities to merge with other ones. Just because they have the same name doesn't mean they have the same rules.
- OP didn't say force. OP specifically said allow.
  
  But then you have all the same federation politics and drama at the community level like we do at the instance level. It'd be such a mess.
  Just make it easier for users to subscribe to each instance of a community with one tap. And let them view them all grouped in one feed.
  And better yet, let people combine any communities together into a personal group; not just ones with the same name. There's no need to get mods involved at all. I wrote more about this in another comment.

I love the idea! In the meantime, I think mods of similar communities should talk to each other and decide to merge their communities into one, perhaps on a server that's not lemmy.world. I don't remember which one, but I've seen that happening
- I think it was !android@lemmy.world that did that and some members of the community threw a fit.
  
  Lol of course they did
- I'm hopeful niche interest communities migrate over to smaller instances, I've seen some niche interest instances pop up slowly but surely thankfully.
  
  I want all like communities to have their own instances, but that’s probably just my organizational brain wanting to group things.
- Yeah, a single site with all the communities. Like reddit....
  
  No, lots of instances with communities that, if they so chose, can mirror each other. Very different

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