After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to multiple similar communities to individual users.
While the diversity that instanced communities provide is a significant benefit, I guarantee most users - including myself - are just waiting for frontrunners to emerge. This will eventually kill most of the potential upside to instanced communities, which arguably should develop in slightly different ways, to specifically push against echo chambers.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no good way to create meta-communities either collectively or individually. So, rather than rebuild reddit functionality (that I would only find useful here in the Fediverse, due to the fragmentation) I had a thought.
Would it be possible to create either explicit Lemmy/kbin functionality that allowed both for the creation and centralized updating of meta-communities?
The thought would be that individuals and groups could effectively add new community instances to centrally managed lists - like a package manager, of sorts. Users could generate lists of communities/magazines, and then (if the meta-community was public) invite people to subscribe to that list for future updates. Upon joining a or running an update to an existing meta-community, the system would check to see if the current instance and user was properly federated in order to engage with that specific instance of the community.
I’ll admit, I’m new, and haven’t dug deep enough into any of the technical documentation to see how much of this is possible, and I’m willing to bet it could be layered on top of Lemmy/kbin via plugins and apps. That said, I’m not sure that’s how it should be done in the future. Thoughts?
There is nothing preventing the creation of meta-communities other than writing the code to put things together.
Using the Activitypub protocol a group is nothing else but an actor that announces (“retweets”) every message that is tagged with its name.
To have meta groups you would have an actor that subscribes to a list of groups and announces (“retweets”) anything that shows up in its feed.
Currently you could make a sort of meta group by having a bot user account that subscribes to several communities and announces everything it sees. The only problem is that Lemmy doesn’t yet let users follow other users or retweet content.