This is the biggest flaw and issue with the fediverse and Lemmy, it’s too damn fragmented with no good way to easily consolidate content from similar, or even identical, communities across instances. So people end up gravitating towards the same few that have the most content.
While this is true, I think this post is more a reminder that .ml is garbage.
True, but the same issue happens with reddit as well, for example gaming vs games vs truegaming. Over time those communities either found their niche (gaming sub became mostly memes, games sub became news and discussions and truegaming tried to become a more serious discussing sub). Actually there were way more gaming subs but unless they found their niche they died out. So people gravitating towards specific communities is a natural occurrence.
As for trying to automatically consolidate communities across instances, it sounds like a great idea on paper but seems like technical she moderation headache, because you won’t have a clear source of truth. Let’s say instance A and instance B both have a community called news. The same news article with the same title is posted on both communities on both instances by different users. Assuming we want to consolidate those posts into one, which instance post will be shown or in more technical terms, which instance becomes the source of truth for that post? Who makes that decision? What if there’s also instance C with the same community and the same post but that instance isn’t federated with instance A, how do we consolidate posts? Each community has its own moderators and moderation rules, who is allowed to moderate the post? What if the moderation rules contradict between instances and both instances want to apply the rules independently, are they supposed to split the post?
Maybe there is an elegant solution to all the problems but I don’t see there being one. I’m not against the idea, the problem is you want to solve its something I have given some thought and because of that I just don’t see it working out the way you’re imagining it.
It would be a fundamental change, but communities should be global and not tied to instances. This would allow for the necessary centralization and reduce duplication. It could also be used to ensure communities survive a in instance going down scenario.
How would that even work? Imagine you spin up a brand new instance and create a new user and want to subscribe to a community. Because there is no one source of truth does the new instance simply not have the posts and comments that were made before the instance was created? If it’s supposed to get historic data as well from where is it getting from? Does it pick a random instance and pull all the posts and comments from that instance?
What if that instance is defederated from another instance with the same community and doesn’t contain the posts and comments from the defederated instance? Does your new instance have to go ask all the posts and comments from all the other instances to rebuild the community dataset on your instance? What if these two instances that are defederated both create the same post with the exact same content? Is that one or two posts?
What if user on one instance changes the name of the post but there’s some weird bug that allows only half the instances to register that change. Did that change actually happen or not? How do you solve the data inconsistencies if there’s no central source of truth?
What about moderation? There’s no central authority to define moderators or moderation policies. How do you verify who is actually a moderator and not someone trying to impersonate a moderator? What if different instances have different moderation policies, how would communities agree on a moderation policy if in essence both instances can claim authority over the community?
And these are still pretty high level questions. It would get more complex if we were to dig deeper into a possible solution. Even if it’s all technically solvable I think the solution would probably be so complex that it becomes unmaintainable which means it becomes unusable.
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This would allow for the necessary centralization
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
I would recommend a button thar switches between local and all for a community. So people can look at it with their particular rule set in play if they wish.
Yall can view All to right? I know it defaults to local, but you can press one button and see everything not defederated.
That just gives you a jumbled mess of everything, which is IMO pretty useless. I want everything pertaining to a subject/interest in a single place, despite being scattered over multiple subs in multiple instances.
I like the idea of having the ability to browse communities with the same name in one place.
Where you can set it to local to have it as it is now, and also being able to browse all of them at once.
