Fediverse

Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.

There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.

I think Lemmy.world should not have 99.999% of communities.

We can have one fediverse community but it should not be on Lemmy.world. It's already extreamly centralized with almost all users. It should have all communities as well?

I feel the same about every other duplicate community. Because i actually care about having a decentralized fediverse.

Lemmy neads a feature where people can "merge" communities from different instances so it appears like a single one.

It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.

You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.

The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.

Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.

I think this is just another variant of FOMO. You don't need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that's it 🤷‍♂️

Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.

This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.

I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.

In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.

I'm subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it's a bit annoying. But it's also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.

Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don't, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.

comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I find this to be more positive than negative. The tone of the entire comment section tends to be set by the first few comments meaning every post has a high risk of becoming it's own tiny echo chamber. Spreading comments across multiple communities makes it more likely that the discussion will explore different aspects of the topic and that different opinions on the topic will be explored.

I feel like it's more of a client issue than a Lemmy issue. We could imagine having clients that correctly support crossposting by having tabs for each comment section.

Why do you think you need to post twice? This is what happens.

The way i handle this is to sub to the biggest community on a given topic i can find. The exception to this is if i find a smaller community that is more active.

It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.

I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.

Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!

You are advocating for a single point of failure.

as lemmy grows and or stabilises some communities will get bigger and more mainstream

Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.

With all the defederation going on nowadays I'm happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn't participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.