What we’re really lacking on the ui end is a way to see groups of identical communities that are on different federated platforms. Hence the idea of a dom-lemmy. The way it would work is lets say you search for a cat community called “cats”, there’s at least dozens of them out there already. Instead it would return the cats dom-lemmy, with the option to either drill down to a specific instance, or to merge all sub-lemmys called cats into a single view
At first I thought this was a good idea, but now I’m not sure. Instead of encouraging the need for that sort of manual work to group every similar community for every topic, I think we should let the communities naturally converge on the winning community.
Why does there need to be one community to rule them all? A thousand communities on a topic with a thousand users each is much better for usability than 1 community with 1 million users. More people get to actually engage with others, be seen, and be heard in smaller communities.
Mega-communities are just white noise machines.
Because if I subscribe to all of them, sometimes I will see 100 identical posts of the relevant news. And if I subscribe to just one, then I’m missing out on a lot of content.
You’re also missing out on a lot of content by not seeing the vast, vast majority of posts that never get noticed.
And you’re missing all of the posts posted on Facebook groups!
And all of the posts posted to Hacker News!
And all of the posts on…
Okay, but I see no reason to intentionally make that issue worse.
And I see no reason to turn spaces that can be used for meaningful activity into ones that can’t be.
I’m not saying those spaces can’t be used. Ideally each instance would end up with its own set of popular communities that have become the one true community. But it’s a much better user experience if every instance doesn’t have all of the communities from every other instance duplicated.
It would be more resilient if it is distributed too, if 1 of 100 instances was temporarily offline the Mega-Magazine (or whatever you want to call it) would still function with 99% of the content.
kbin is planning on something like multi-reddits: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/65 maybe lemmy could too
@crwcomposer
@KittyCat
There is an issue around this on the lemmy GitHub. One ide I liked from that discussion was allowing community mods to subscribe to other communites via tags.
Like that way all the star trek communities that have the same tag could share content, and it would not depend on matching the community names in some automated way.