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  • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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    1 year ago

    People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.

    Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.

    • hal@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.

    • l4sgc@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Pardon my confusion since I’m new to the fediverse as well, but isn’t every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.

      • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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        1 year ago

        Nah those are like sibling instances. I’m talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.

        Just thinking out loud, haven’t really fleshed out the idea yet.

        • Balthazar@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          That already exists. ATM, the thing you’re confusing it with is that there are 4-5 “gaming” subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it’ll look like this instance “Technology@Beehaw.org” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).

          • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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            1 year ago

            I guess its just a natural progression of being absorbed by other communities that are larger. What I was getting at was a new feature that combines multiple communities into a single one on the backend and presents them as a single one (with interleaved posts/comments from all 5 communities or whatever)

            • Balthazar@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              I don’t know enough to truly be able to comment, but some others I’ve seen said that this creates a dozen problems to solve a signular one

        • Headless3638@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, I think I get it - there’s a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you’re talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?

      • Setarkus.MX@mander.xyz
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        1 year ago

        From what I know, the instances share the posts between each other, but they need to have had contact with another instance somehow before they can get posts from there. Something like a user searching for an instance that isn’t yet known to their “home” instance yet or following a link to it.
        As I understood it, this lets the instances know of each other. Posts of unknown instances won’t show up on your instance until the connection has been made.
        So maybe a super instance could somehow include a newly created instance as soon as it has connected with any other instance already in the super instance.

        (might not be too coherent since I know little about this all as of now ^^)

        • l4sgc@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Wouldn’t the home instance already have to know about the remote instance in some way for it to show up in that initial user’s search?

    • patatahooligan@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don’t have to think about different instances most of the time. I’ve only really noticed two points that would be confusing:

      • the sign up process
      • the “local”/“all” distinction

      So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren’t already familiar with it is:

      • Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
      • Filter by “all” by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don’t understand what instances are and what “local” vs “all” means, then you are probably here for the “all” experience. If you understand and really want “local” you are probably fine having to set it yourself.