I don’t understand how Lemmy intends to do it when the different instances are federated, if several instances create the same community for example…is that possible?
I don’t understand how Lemmy intends to do it when the different instances are federated, if several instances create the same community for example…is that possible?
I don’t really have a firm opinion on this, there would be positive and negative aspects. The goal of my post was to talk about it with you to try to better understand how it works.
Let’s imagine that there are hundreds of federated servers and therefore potentially hundreds of times the same community names. It might be complicated for users to choose. And it also risks diluting the strength of the communities, so potentially little activity per community… In addition, if different communities are moderated or administered by different people and each has its own moderation or content rules, this can make things complex for the user.
One can also imagine other solutions, for example instead of following communities, the user could follow hashtags. When he publishes content, he is obliged to put tags on his content. Other users then follow the tags that would replace the communities.
That might solve some problems, but it might create others that I haven’t thought of yet.
The advantage is that I can follow hashtags throughout the federation, and keep the power of the federated network without fragmenting communities. There would be no need to worry about squatting community name
Dessalines already wrote a post on why he dislikes the hashtag idea, and I tend to agree with it.
https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/issues/317#issuecomment-574272305
Thanks for the link, I didn’t know there was already a discussion about this. It’s not a simple issue to solve, i think there are positive and negative aspects to both solutions.
The community solution:
What scares me about this solution is the problems associated with fragmentation. If users who are interested in design, for example, will do a search and find 36 communities on the federation with the name “/design@server.tld”. I imagine that the first reaction will be to choose the community that has the most members, therefore the most content and interaction. I don’t think they will have fun reading all the descriptions, all the rules of the 36 communities, but I could be wrong. One way to limit fragmentation a little bit would perhaps be, when creating communities, to show a list of all the existing communities with the same name. I’m also a little afraid that this fragmentation will result in less interaction between users and that we will end up with many dying communities with no interaction.
The hashtag solution:
What can be problematic with this solution is that we’re going into the unknown, we don’t really have a model to follow. Which from a certain point of view can be a good thing because it also allows you to stand out from Reddit and create a unique differentiation. There is also the aspect related to moderation that remains unresolved, we could perhaps invent an effective or democratic way to elect or remove moderators for each hashtag. In any case, I think we should at least give users the possibility to block/hide certain users or instances.
Tbh this discussion doesn’t seem very important at the moment, because it relies on federation already working. In reality there is a ton of work needed just to get the basic federation working, so that’s what we should focus on.
Okay, I understand. Thanks, I’ll follow the progress with interest then. _