Right now there are similarely named communities across the fediverse.
“fediverse@xxx”, “Linux@xxx”, “asklemmy”, “askkbin”…etc…
I’m on kbin and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to use the fediverse more productively, by reaching the largest amount of people for asking questions, solving problems, simply put: to engage… like I used to do on Reddit?
I would like to see some kind of “canonicalization” feature in Lemmy to support this, similar to CNAME in DNS.
For example, !android@lemmy.world recently merged into !android@lemdro.id, where lemdro.id is the canonical server.
So it would be awesome if !android@lemmy.world was entirely equivalent to !android@lemdro.id. But as it stands, the lemmy.world community had to lock and everyone had to individually migrate themselves.
Essentially, in a case like this, I just want to call it !android (or c/android) and not need to care about which server it is hosted on. But as it is currently, I always have to reference the canonical domain since it is different than the one my account is on.
Aliasing is a thing on Mastodon user accounts. There’s no conceptual reason it couldn’t be extended groups on other platforms, too.
At the same time, if group aliasing became a thing, one should not expect that one group become an alias of another. Centralizing communities doesn’t always make sense, and our Love of Large Numbers is something we should actually actively push back against.
Aliasing makes sense when you have a dozen tiny communities, none of which are large enough to be self-sustaining. Once communities have crossed the critical limit and become viable all on their own, we really shouldn’t actually want them to merge with other viable communities. Smaller communities are easier to moderate, are generally friendlier spaces, and the promote a larger diversity of opinion and active, meaningful discussion.
Bigger ones devolve rapidly into jockeying for attention.
If you’re only going to read 10 or 15 posts in a community, be it one of 1000 users or one of 10,000,000, then you’re generally going to be better off with the 1000. Anything big enough to make it to the top of the big blog will probably be discussed in the small one, too. But the opposite is just not going to be true.
For example, !android@lemmy.world recently merged into !android@lemdro.id, where lemdro.id is the canonical server.
Off-topic and what follows doesn’t mean your CNAME idea is bad, but it’s important to highlight that this example is wrong because the “merger” was forced because current mods were victims of imposter syndrome and felt obligated to gift the community to Reddit mods on another instance and denied us 19k members a say in this, and we are right now requesting to cancel it because it was a one person move. See more context in my comment here: https://lemmy.world/comment/980033 . In short, there is no “merger”, it is a rogue mod move and if you liked !android@lemmy.world and never asked to move, I recommend you stay because I believe we can absolutely defeat this hostage-taking and reopen the community.
Ugh. I thought this whole thing seemed fishy. It was way too quick of a pivot from the lemmy.world Android mods being upset about the new /c barging in and trying to hoover away their members… to them happily handing everything over and closing the doors.
Just goes to show how insidious the behind-the-scenes of Reddit mod drama really is/was. And a shame that it’s just getting dragged over to Lemmy.
to them happily handing everything over and closing the doors.
What changed their stance is that they were offered mod positions on the new instance (all of this is public). But anyway, whatever the motives are, and whatever happened behind the scenes during their private Matrix chat, it still stands that there is no merger. 19k users are being treated as transferable goods and are being denied a say in this. There is a hostile takeover taking place and we are seeking to abort it.
My point was just to not quickly consider !android@lemmy.world “merging” with the Reddit mods’ community as a given fact, it’s a falsehood that is being propagated by the Reddit mods.
You’ve made two threads about this already. It really doesn’t need to be spammed everywhere.
The “merger” was cited as a factual example. I do need to correct that because it is a lie.
Oh, I disagree. This is valid context to the current discussion, and it raises the visibility of a real issue.
The merging of communities above a certain size should be discouraged for the sake of diversification and moderatability, and if already large communities are being merged without or evenagainst community input, that’s an issue.
There is no reason the admins on the server with the locked community should play ball with the mods here. These are independent and unaffiliated websites, after all.
If you don’t like it, you don’t need to read it.
Yea. The mod unilaterally made the decision to lock the lemmy.world instance without input from the thousands of users. They then doubled down on at least one response saying basically they same shit spez shit Reddit’s changes. It’s ridiculous. Ideally, if someone wants to lock a community for nothing but selfish reasons, and should be able to take it and reopen for someone else to take over.
Forgive my ignorance, I’m not trying to argue, I just want to understand. What is the benefit of keeping the @lemmy.world one open? Why do people not want to hop over to the @lemdro.id one? I saw the post and just subscribed to the new one, and I thought it was easy enough. I don’t see what the difference is, or why it’s worth the drama, tbh.
Why do people not want to hop over to the @lemdro.id one?
Why should we move when we were already fine with !android@lemmy.world and no one ever asked to move, just because the rogue mod’s imposter syndrome kicked in? And even then, whatever the reasons and even if it’s “just a few clicks away”, forcing this “merger” is simply wrong, barbaric and this is them treating us 19k members as a transferable commodity and even the rogue mod behind the closure publicly admitted that we should not have a say in this and that it’s his choice alone. You should definitely go over the context here to see that it is a hostile takeover: https://lemmy.world/comment/980033
Anyway, this is off-topic and the goal was just to point out that the example is not accurate given how the events unfolded and that we are trying to abort that forced “merger” right now.
This is how Threads would take over the Fediverse and eventually win when they decide ActivityPub development is too slow and holds them back.
Boom all your communities are now empty.
Federation works because we’re spread out. Just subscribe to all the small communities.
Now, what might be a better idea is a cross post functionality where the crosspost has a single identifier of its own so it only will show up once in your feed (I guess as your local instance)
That way you can have the ability to reach everyone as if you had posted a bunch of times, but a big popular corporate instance can’t gather up all the communities and then defederate and wall them off.
Threads is a Mastodon analog.
Reddit is a Lemmy analog.
There are no Threads communities!
Or perhaps a reciprocity between communities, where instead of everyone subscribing to c/mushroomA and c/mushroomB, the community of mushroomA would decide to reciprocate w c/mushroomB so their posts would display alongside mushroomA posts. Kind of like a keyword association that generates a multi-Reddit like co-mingling.
Edited to remove all those pings.
