It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.
It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.
It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.
Thoughts?
I see it more of federation copying the structure and posting habits, despite repeating its mistakes while also making said mistakes worse.
What I’d like to see is global posting for some things (and those things using tags, topics, events/timelines etc) such as news and some types of videos. You’d still be discussing it on your instance (further unification could be done, or maybe just quick-switching what instance comment section you’re looking at/posting on) only now most of the time it’d be on a topic/event itself or on specific coverage of it.
If someone wants to post it to a community, they can make a thread with their own take (hopefully something substantial, but it’d depend on the community) for people to comment on instead. Thus better grouping and filtering.
Any text post, original content, or less general content would function the same. And perhaps posting links could even work the same posting-wise, just auto-generating a global link thread for people to discuss if they don’t want to comment on the community post that originated it (which hopefully means articles have something to discuss or at least are a very good fit for the community that they’re in).
I mod a sub that is niche and there are 3 other subs by the same name. We all agreed to put a sticky post on 2 of the 3 directing people to the main.
It’s no different than reddit, !beekeeping@lemmy.world, !beekeeping@lemmy.ml, !beekeeping@iforget.lemmy is no different than /r/beekeeping /r/bees /r/beekeeping
Right now we are creating communities with the same name as reddit subs to aid in transitioning. That won’t last forever, and as long as people use good community descriptions people will find the good ones.
I mean it is different from reddit in that now instead of 1 server with arbitrarily divided communities, now you have as many as are popular and it is more visible because there isn’t enough content. If there are tons of users are all in one place it might make sense for something like /r/bees , but here I think it’d be better served with a tag like #bees for all instances ( ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶u̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶/̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ more serious than I thought, but you’d need to bookmark that tag unless there are other features I’m unaware of). Whereas beekeeping does make more sense as a community.
I could also see it being interesting for unified communities. It would be mostly the same as now in most ways except posts would be visible from all instances (if federation is on and that community is not blocked). Mods would moderate their own instance (and nothing would stop users from posting to a different instance of the community if they so choose) though limited mod sharing could be a thing. So really it’s just something to make things less annoying than subbing to 3+ communities (hopefully with link/story merging too as my first comment mentions).
Also with divided communities in mind, why not make posting to multiple communities in one go (tied together thus not cluttering new, and possibly allowing community-specific versions) a thing?