Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

people having to subscribe to both to see the content
posters having to crosspost to both
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

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[-] jet@hackertalks.com 62 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it's indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post

Kind of like a symbolic link

If not that then give us the ability to have relative references to posts inside of Lemmy. Instead of referencing a URL to a specific instance, kind of like the ! Or @ for for community names and usernames.

Then across post could at least link to the canonical discussion for talking.

[-] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ActivityPub wise this could be modeled pretty cleanly as (what Mastodon calls) boosts. Or perhaps quote boosts as implemented by every software except upstream Mastodon (including Mastodon forks like Treehouse or Fedibird), if different comment threads are needed.

Hell, let's make cross posts work like that.

[-] hempster@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

In the meantime, third-party apps can combine posts from multiple communities (that have the same URL) coalesced one single post, and pull comments from every instance's post.

[-] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 1 year ago

Automatic merging of that sort is problematic as each community can have significantly different rules, conventions, moderation strictness, priorities and overall "vibe".

[-] Spzi@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

It can also make comment sections confusing where people talk about the comment section. When different viewers see different versions of the comment section (for example through different combinations of federation), it can be extra confusing to merge them all into one stream.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 1 year ago

Yeap, this is the kind of improvement that needs to happen at the client level, not server.

[-] erlend_sh@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it's indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post.

This is effectively how the Community-following-Community proposal works. I’ll repost what I commented in this thread:

I still believe the best solution is the ability for Communities to follow other Communities. That is essentially a fully automated version of this sibling proposal.

This has been explained in great detail by ‘jamon’ here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecomment-1595273502

This basically lets Communities opt to federate directly with other Communities, abiding by the same network dynamics as the fediverse at large, I.e. cross-network moderation by (de)federation.

Here’s a succinct description of the problem that C-C following solves:

If you are an active user (not moderator) of Lemmy, the requirement for this becomes apparent almost immediately. One of the biggest strengths of these forum are communities-at-scale. Being able to easily post and interact with large groups of people is the benefit to the user that makes Lemmy (and all other social media) appealing.

As a user, I recently wanted to post to AskLemmy. Almost every single instance has thier own separate AskLemmy implementation. Naturally, I'd tend to post to the one with the most users. But inherently, I'm missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to AskLemmy@lemmy.ml (which had 3k users), but by doing that, I'm missing out on the users from lemm.ee, behaw, lemmy.world which in total are far more than 3k.

There is already a FEP for this functionality: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366?u=erlend_sh

[-] Die4Ever@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it’s indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post

Some discussion about how crossposts could work differently

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3827

If not that then give us the ability to have relative references to posts inside of Lemmy. Instead of referencing a URL to a specific instance, kind of like the ! Or @ for for community names and usernames.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987