So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.

How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.

  • sibachian
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    4 years ago

    then what’s the point of lemmy? a federated community is in a sense centralizing communication through multiple isolated servers. if each one is isolated from the other, and we have 10 different discussion hubs focusing on !chocolatecakes@cooking.com, !chocolatecakes@cookies.com etc, then the community is severely fractured and lemmy as a platform doesn’t work as it doesn’t take advantage of the integration at all. for it to work as a platform, cooking.com should be able to choose if it wish to include !chocolatecakes@cookies.com.

    • DessalinesA
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      4 years ago

      The point is you can follow federated communities from any server. Not that those communities are “shared” by several instances. What you’re talking about isn’t federated, it’s merging. Does mastodon let you merge users across instances?

      • sibachian
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        4 years ago

        precisely, so a !main@startrek.com community makes very little sense for how communities are integrated through federation, a !startrek@mywebsite.com makes a lot more sense, but when there is a !startrek@mywebsite.com and a !startrek@yourwebsite.com you’ve fractured the community if both lemmy servers are federated. a !tng@mywebsite.com and a !ds9@yourwebsite.com makes more sense. you can’t really compare it to how mastodon as it’s an entirely different type of community platform.

          • sibachian
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            4 years ago

            that sounds like a good way to avoid fracturing communities but how would it work in ways of moderation?

            • nutomicMA
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              4 years ago

              I dont think its a good idea. Moderation would be completely separate for both of these communities. It would probably be possible to make this work as people in this thread imagine, but it would be a lot of work for very little benefit. We have way more useful things to work on.

              • sibachian
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                4 years ago

                bridging fractured communities as a community platform is not important?

                • nutomicMA
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                  4 years ago

                  Not as important as moderation tools, or language tagging for posts/comments.