I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
True fragmentation seems like it would be a huge issue.
Also allowing easy exporting/migrating between instances should be possible.
From my understanding (having literally discovered lemmy and the fediverse like an hour ago) mastodon supports things like grouping and account migration, so I assume it should be possible with lemmy?
Also I’ll be honest I have no idea what mastodon is.
Mastodon is to Twitter what Lemmy is to Reddit: a decentralized alternative built on the ActivityPub protocol for the fediverse.
Someone’s already replied about Mastodon’s relation to Twitter, but I think the big part of why we can learn from Mastodon is because they’ve gone through all this in November ish.
They had the server difficulties, regular people getting confused at how federation works, struggling with the conflict of wanting to leave Twitter but Mastodon being relatively small compared to Twitter, people making accounts but then petering off in terms of usage (like me! Except I didn’t use Twitter much anyway).
Whilst the lessons from Mastodon won’t always be applicable to Lemmy, there’s a lot that can be learnt
Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter.
The underlying ActivityPub protocol is pretty flexible. A Mastodon user can subscribe to Lemmy communties and a Lemmy user can follow a Mastodon account. Same goes for KBin which has added functionality in that communites (magazines in KBin) can follow hashtags that Mastodon accounts might use, bringing those posts in as additional community content.