this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Yeah, but not really. You couldn’t create r/Doug twice. You could create r/Dougs or r/Dougie, but not two r/Doug. Here, you can create a “Doug” for every server that exists.
I have hope for solutions though. There’s only about 8,000 active subreddits in total. The cream will rise to the top quickly and we’ll all get used to subscribing to the ‘top 3 or 4’ “Doug” communities and I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.
I don't think that's a good idea, it would give the impression of something that is not there. Imagine talking to someone about a post that you just read but that someone else literally can't see because they aren't using the app, so they can't see that instance. Plus, how do you handle communities on instances that have been blocked by some other instances?
A better way would be to have a way to officially merge these communities within ActivityPub. Effectively, have a protocol for cross instance communities, and then the mods of the disparate communities would just have to actively choose to join their communities. It'd be like the reddit sub splitting, but in reverse!
I agree
Look, as long as I don’t have to remember both a community AND a server name, I’m good. I just don’t want to hav to remember and / or subscribe to multiple things with the exact same name.
I can understand that desire, but think about this from a practical perspective. You are on lemmy.world, but someone else is on lemmy.ml. If you both use the same app that does this behind the scenes aggregation for you, you won't be able to tell which instance is holding which post. Let's say someone on sh.itjust.works posts on their instance of a community, but the app just makes it appear like it's in the community.
Now, if lemmy.world blocks sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml does not, then you can't see that post, since it's blocked for you. But the person on lemmy.ml and on sh.itjust.works would be able to see it. This is a good example of solving a problem by create a dozen new ones.
Lemmy developers have been discussing how to address this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
There isn't a clear solution, since some communities have different names, so how would an app know to join them? Or would you join communities that had deliberately been split for various reasons?
Clearly coordination and agreement between leaders is needed. I suggested something like that with a pseudo-instance of "@global", for example. However, it seems there is some resistance to the mere idea of globalizing certain popular communities, which I can understand.
Federation comes with its own set of problems, like replication, data volume, storage requirements, and massive overlap.
That last one affects user experience directly, and needs to be addressed. Maybe it will sort itself out, maybe not. If we have 10,000 servers, even 100 almost the same communities means quite a bit of work on the part of users just to decide which ones to join.
We are looking at the human equivalent of a system with an extremely fragmented disk, or database tables with indexes that end up doing table scans.
Periodic re-organization will be necessary to to maintain usability.
I think a solution could be to allow communities to merge voluntarily if the mods of both agree to. It would only work with instances that aren't blocked anywere. But users that would be subscibed to one would automatically be subscibed to all the merged commuities as well and you could post to the merged commuity from any of the participating instances. That would have the advantage that if one instance fails the community would almost seamlessly continue on the other instances.
That would probably be the best way to do it. Let the community mods agree which others they're "bundled" with, make it part of the metadata about each community, and then when someone subscribes to Bob1, their home server gets the list of related communities and adds them to Bob2 and Bob3 as well (but not Bobs 4 through 256, which aren't on Bob1's list)