Is there a way of "merging" multiple related communities into a single view in the lemmy 'federation'? detailed question inside

Not sure if I understand this, but I think the way the lemmy federation works is:

there are multiple servers in the federation (for example, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.whatever, etc.)
each server can have multiple communities, which are like subreddits
so, for example, each server can have its own community for photography.

Q1: is my summary correct?

Q2: is there a way to subscribe to multiple related communities across different servers and "merge" those communities into a single view? so that I don't have to click on each separate one? edit: for example, if there are 3 servers that each have a photography community, can I merge them into a single "photography" view?

Sorry if this is a silly question (or if the answer is obvious).

16 comments

You're asking for a multi-reddit functionality and the issue is already opened and known to the developers.
- Although the developers recently said they are working on improving stability and won't have time to add features for a while.
- TYVM
- Sorely needed IMO

I’m new, an original refugee and don’t understand everything yet. I’m finding this place much more friendly and helpful and like it much better. I’m older (55) and used to work in IT, but all this still baffles me. I’m not going back because I abhor what’s going on. I’m hopeful that with time, all my favorite subs will be here and I already spend a lot of time here. I feel much more free to comment without fear of retribution and that’s a welcome relief. It was rather ostracizing on Reddit to feel that I shouldn’t comment because of all the negativity I would get. My life’s hard enough without getting put down for every little thing I said. I love it here and I’ve only been here for a week or so. Thanks everyone for being so nice.

Q1: Correct
Q2: Not at present, but it's a highly requested feature. I would imagine it will be around soon^tm in one form or another.
- TYVM
- I don't feel like the linked feature exactly describes a multi-reddit function, this feature is more about tagging and categorisation of communities into groups for new user discovery purposes. It's not clear whether users will be able to create their own categories and add their own tagged communities into user managed views.

Q1: is my summary correct?
Yes.
Q2: is there a way to subscribe to multiple related communities across different servers and “merge” those communities into a single view? so that I don’t have to click on each separate one?
No.
Though from what I seen people try to limit what communities they create to not have 10 variations on the same topic.
- Does Lemmy have a feature where an instance owner can alias a community on a different server?
  Say there’s a lemmy.ml c/llamas and a beehaw c/llamas, and lemmy.ml agrees to just redirect !llamas@lemmy.ml to !llamas@beehaw.org. Is that currently possible? Is it on the desired feature list?
  
  Not at the moment. But there are a lot of new feature requests pouring in, so anything is possible long term.

Not at the moment unless an app developer integrates it as a client side feature, rather than server side.

Are you talking about, subscribing? Subscribe to all of the communities you want and then sort by subscribed on your home page. If you want to folow a community that isn't on your instance, copy and paste the link to that community in your instance's search box and subscribe to it from there.

Is this how kbin magazines work? I thought I saw that they can subscribe to say, certain hashtags and then consolidate it into one place?

I feel like any cases of multiple communities for a given subject will naturally resolve as users develop a preference for one community over the other. The users from the lesser communities will organically migrate to the dominant community for that subject, or we'll arrive at the conclusion that each community actually explores niches of that topic that are worthy of separation or delineation.
That's how it worked on reddit, anyway. Multireddit functionality of any sort was missing on most platforms, and yeah there's a lot of users that want it. But a lot of that desire is borne from the current state of Lemmy, rather than what it will be once the fediverse is more developed both as a concept in software and a concept in social media interaction

16 comments