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?
It would be neat if communities from different instances could federate with each other like the instances themselves do.
In my mind it would work like this:
If two communities have the same topic, and have compatible rules, then they could federate with each other. This would show the posts from both in a combined view in whichever instance you were logged in on.
For moderators there would be two types of posts.
Posts originating on their instance they would have full mod control over, and any actions taken on the posts would change the post for all other communities they are federated with.
Posts originating from federated communities I think mods should be able to hide in the local communities as well as a subset of other mod abilities, like sticky. However these would only affect the local copy, not the original or the other federated communities.
As far as I know neither Kbin nor Lemmy has anything like that, but I think it would be a great feature if either could make something like that work.
Honest question: If a federated community is conceptually acting as a single community, why should moderators be limited to the side corresponding to their instance? At that point, wouldn’t there be a unified ruleset for the federated community that is separate from the rules of the hosting instances?
I get that not all instances would abide by the same rules, but I reckon that if you want to keep a federated community, you also need to make sure to comply with all instances or risk some instance from removing their community from the federation.
I think there are a couple of reasons to not allow mods on one instance to moderate posts on another instance.
One example I can think of, if I wanted to grief a community I might go to another instance that doesn’t have that community, create it, making myself a mod in the process. Then I would request federation with the community I want to grief. Then I’d mod away all their posts, or do anything else I wanted. With some luck and okay timing I bet a person could do a lot of damage before federation was turned off. People in IRC chat rooms used to use a similar technique to steal OP from others in rooms. Making modding of federated content only effect the local instance would contain any of that damage. As a feature creep sort of feature, perhaps modding done on an instance could send a suggested mod response to the originating instance, and they could do what they wanted with the information.
Also, having it set up like I originally suggested could allow for other non standard federation arrangements. Like one instance that allows nsfw content in a community to be federated with one that auto blocks anything marked nsfw. Maybe even one way federation, where an instance shows posts from another in a community, but it isn’t reciprocated. I don’t think that would be usually the best idea, but it might work.
It might also help with the potential problem of entire communities being eradicated by rogue actions from an instance admin, or instance issues in general. If the community is spread out across multiple instances, it can weather problems on its “main” instance without being as easily dispersed.
