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?
As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It’s the way federation works, it’s not something that can be forced on people.
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.
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.
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.
You’ve made two threads about this already. It really doesn’t need to be spammed everywhere.
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.
There are valid reasons to be for the merger, and valid reasons to be against it. However, the argument has been posted quite visibly for anyone that cares about it, and the appeal has been made to the lemmy.world admin. The admin will decide what to do, and that should be the end of it.
What we really do not need is a swarm of cranks coming out of the woodwork to Correct The Record™ every time someone makes mention of the event without putting the “proper” spin on it. It is not some grave injustice. If you don’t like the outcome, then join one of the other existing android communities instead of participating in the merger. Or create your own, so that you can run it how you want. And then get on with your life.
the appeal has been made to the lemmy.world admin. The admin will decide what to do, and that should be the end of it.
Why?
By that logic, your complaint has been made, shouldn’t you shut up, too?
The “merger” was cited as a factual example. I do need to correct that because it is a lie.
We’ll be just fine without your hot take in every thread.
If you prefer the lie then you can just ignore my correction, and my future ones as well because I will keep correcting this falsehood as long as this lie is being repeated. There’s a block button on Lemmy.
No thanks, I’m allergic to filter bubbles. Instead of shitting up every thread and telling people to put in nose plugs, perhaps you could stop being an “ethics in game journalism”-style crank?
I mean, are thousands of people not enough to have in your question-answering network?
Like, at my job I’m extremely lucky to have three people to whom I can go to ask questions. Three people is a huge resource.
I don’t really see it as an issue. Post it to whichever community you are most active on. If people want to part of that particular instance, they will see it and interact with it.
Just like I’m interacting with this post right now even though I’m not on lemmy.world. I’m quite over what became the gamification of karma on reddit, and really hope it doesn’t become a thing here. There’s no reason about having to worry about which instance to post something to, people will find it and interact with it.
How did you handle it on Reddit?
It is no different than reddit. Eventually one community will have the momentum to dominate a space and everyone will gravitate to it over time.
The only feature I think we need is an admin curated keywords option for mods to add in search results for communities. Like people often search for bike when they mean bicycle. The old reddit community name for bike repair is called bike wrench. It is the same here. The main community for bikes in general is Bicycle. People may or may not find communities based on these keyword differences.
It may just take a while for the go to communities to hit a critical mass. The same thing happened on reddit for smaller topics, one will eventually have the large majority and the others will die
Isn’t that the purpose of the fediverse’s concept? Have several communities and if you don’t like the moderation for example you just go to another one or create a new one. Definitly problematic for niche topics though
There is no “we” that’s empowered to do anything on the fediverse, and that’s by design.
You, as an individual, are free to start or register with whatever instance(s) you want and start, engage with, subscribe to or block whatever communities you want. And all the other users here are exactly equally free to do any or all of those things.
It’s safe to assume that over time, activity will tend to concentrate in a few specific communities, and that most notable topics will come to have a dominant community. I think, snd self-evidently many others also think, that that’s something that should happen organically over time rather than being forcibly implemented by some authority. But more to the point, that’s something that only can happen organically and over time, since nobody has the authority to do it any other way.
