This is the biggest flaw and issue with the fediverse and Lemmy, it’s too damn fragmented with no good way to easily consolidate content from similar, or even identical, communities across instances. So people end up gravitating towards the same few that have the most content.
True, but the same issue happens with reddit as well, for example gaming vs games vs truegaming. Over time those communities either found their niche (gaming sub became mostly memes, games sub became news and discussions and truegaming tried to become a more serious discussing sub). Actually there were way more gaming subs but unless they found their niche they died out. So people gravitating towards specific communities is a natural occurrence.
As for trying to automatically consolidate communities across instances, it sounds like a great idea on paper but seems like technical she moderation headache, because you won’t have a clear source of truth. Let’s say instance A and instance B both have a community called news. The same news article with the same title is posted on both communities on both instances by different users. Assuming we want to consolidate those posts into one, which instance post will be shown or in more technical terms, which instance becomes the source of truth for that post? Who makes that decision? What if there’s also instance C with the same community and the same post but that instance isn’t federated with instance A, how do we consolidate posts? Each community has its own moderators and moderation rules, who is allowed to moderate the post? What if the moderation rules contradict between instances and both instances want to apply the rules independently, are they supposed to split the post?
Maybe there is an elegant solution to all the problems but I don’t see there being one. I’m not against the idea, the problem is you want to solve its something I have given some thought and because of that I just don’t see it working out the way you’re imagining it.
It would be a fundamental change, but communities should be global and not tied to instances. This would allow for the necessary centralization and reduce duplication. It could also be used to ensure communities survive a in instance going down scenario.
I would recommend a button that switches between local and all for a community. So people can look at it with their particular rule set in play if they wish.
That just gives you a jumbled mess of everything, which is IMO pretty useless. I want everything pertaining to a subject/interest in a single place, despite being scattered over multiple subs in multiple instances.
/all + new + comments is like my main use case, yet it’s frustrating because I can only view a tiny amount of comments at once, and only the first page of them. Hoping that gets fixed at some point.
This is the biggest flaw and issue with the fediverse and Lemmy, it’s too damn fragmented with no good way to easily consolidate content from similar, or even identical, communities across instances. So people end up gravitating towards the same few that have the most content.
While this is true, I think this post is more a reminder that .ml is garbage.
The fact alone that you made that comment proves otherwise
Crossposting
True, but the same issue happens with reddit as well, for example gaming vs games vs truegaming. Over time those communities either found their niche (gaming sub became mostly memes, games sub became news and discussions and truegaming tried to become a more serious discussing sub). Actually there were way more gaming subs but unless they found their niche they died out. So people gravitating towards specific communities is a natural occurrence.
As for trying to automatically consolidate communities across instances, it sounds like a great idea on paper but seems like technical she moderation headache, because you won’t have a clear source of truth. Let’s say instance A and instance B both have a community called news. The same news article with the same title is posted on both communities on both instances by different users. Assuming we want to consolidate those posts into one, which instance post will be shown or in more technical terms, which instance becomes the source of truth for that post? Who makes that decision? What if there’s also instance C with the same community and the same post but that instance isn’t federated with instance A, how do we consolidate posts? Each community has its own moderators and moderation rules, who is allowed to moderate the post? What if the moderation rules contradict between instances and both instances want to apply the rules independently, are they supposed to split the post?
Maybe there is an elegant solution to all the problems but I don’t see there being one. I’m not against the idea, the problem is you want to solve its something I have given some thought and because of that I just don’t see it working out the way you’re imagining it.
It would be a fundamental change, but communities should be global and not tied to instances. This would allow for the necessary centralization and reduce duplication. It could also be used to ensure communities survive a in instance going down scenario.
. . . And how would moderation work?
I would recommend a button that switches between local and all for a community. So people can look at it with their particular rule set in play if they wish.
Yall can view All to right? I know it defaults to local, but you can press one button and see everything not defederated.
That just gives you a jumbled mess of everything, which is IMO pretty useless. I want everything pertaining to a subject/interest in a single place, despite being scattered over multiple subs in multiple instances.
I like the idea of having the ability to browse communities with the same name in one place.
Where you can set it to local to have it as it is now, and also being able to browse all of them at once.
/all + new + comments is like my main use case, yet it’s frustrating because I can only view a tiny amount of comments at once, and only the first page of them. Hoping that gets fixed at some point.
Consolidation is still worse long term. There’s not that many competing communities.