I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
That’s right. !Gaming@lemmy.ml is different from !Gaming@beehaw.org
Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn’t really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
well that’s confusing
It is different for sure.
The “lemmy-verse” is really just a bunch of separate websites all running the same software that talks to each other. It’s like email, where you can send an email from a Gmail account, and receive it on an outlook account. The same concept being applied to social media now.
I feel like Lemmy/Kbin should indicate the host along with the community name. (i.e. @gaming@lemmy.ml)
They do, given it’s not on your instance. See the attached screenshot, the host website is in the same format you mentioned:
not in kbin, you have to mouse over the name to see the host
Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
One of my favorite features of Lemmy. Makes taking over and astroturfing communities more costly.
wait, what about if you have two communities where mods and admins are fine. Are there any options to federate those communities?
all this time I was under impression that communities already federate
There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.
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The only “universal community search” tool that we know of so far, is https://browse.feddit.de/ .
But I’d be very open to adding this type of functionality into lemmy’s apps, and this UI too.
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yep, that does make sense from security / moderation standpoint, as one “god community” would probably get Bad Apple’d ™ .
but I would argue that “lol just manually opt-in to other communities” could be improved.
I will go search through issues on GitHub to see which of my ideas were already proposed and which still need to be opened 👍
You can follow both, that’s the federation.
Is it?
On Mastodon I can take a look at “Federated timeline” and see the posts from the people that I have not followed. Because instances already federate by themselves (due to some other user on my instance following the user on other instance) but yes, I see your point
Yep. Would be cool if we could subscribe to tags or topics so to speak. The 2 related gaming communities could then be grouped together in a federated view for the topic “Gaming”. At least for reading comments, not sure how posting would work.
good idea
You know, I actually really like the idea of tags. I don’t currently have an issue with manually subscribing to similar communities on different servers (I’m often just browsing “all” to see all communities and all servers). But being able to subscribe to a tag would be cool. Then I could more easily identify and opt out of the communities I don’t like that match those tags.
That would be cool
Why does “better” always mean “more complicated” on the Fediverse?
It’s just how the internet used to work before centralized US tech giants took over all comms platforms. Instead of one site, there are many to choose from.
Sometimes the best thing isn’t the easiest thing
Makes sense, thank you!
Unfortunately that breaks the concept of federation. I expected servers with good relationships with each other to replicate posts, otherwise what’s the point of federation?
The point of federation (on Lemmy) was to allow the different websites to talk to each other. So your lemmy.ml account can talk to most other websites that run lemmy software. This means create posts on external communities, comments, and be able to follow such communities. For now, the choice was made to keep communities local and not locally federated.
It sounds more like identity federation. I think it’s going to be very confusing for a lot of people.
They do replicate
So in this case @gaming@lemmy.ml and @gaming@beehaw.org are two different communities, both of which can be followed, and both of which federate to anyone that follows them.
It’s similar to the way multiple closely related subs can exist on reddit. And it will resolve in the same way, with the users ultimately deciding
What you are describing is just a form of “remote following”, which is merely local caching of some content from another instance. As you wrote, each @gaming is an entirely independent community, even if the moderators are the same people across multiple servers. If an instance is shut down the community is gone. If the instance decides to throttle access and start charging money users have to pay or abandon the community. In short, this is not a significantly better user experience than traditional online forums. I’d rather have real federation.
That’s the way ActivityPub federation works. It’s built on ActivityPub.
There isn’t one that offers federation in the way you want it
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How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?
https://browse.feddit.de/