Yeah seeing same article about american politics posted cross half dozen communities on different instances really is killing my feed.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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I like the idea. I suspect it would make moderation a challenge but it sounds pretty useful
This was the idea behind MultiReddits if I'm not mistaken. In which case a simple operator like:
Fediverse@lemmy.world+Fediverse@lemmy.ml
Could get baked into the Lemmy core to allow this to work.
I asked the Lemmy devs about multi-reddits type subscribing and they said that it's on their list but they need help developing it because they have a huge list. I like the multiereddits way because then the user decides and there isn't extra mods (managers) sprinkled in.
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What are MultiReddits and how do they work?
Basically you can see multiple subreddits of your choosing as if they are a single subreddit.
Oh wow, that can be beneficial to some people. Thank you for taking the time to explain
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That's still just two separate communities. Like a filter. That's fine. That's not what OP is suggesting though. What OP is suggesting is much more extreme.
If all federated communities could decide upon to regulate same rules, every one of them could be moderated by their own moderators. But the problem I see here is the things that's being federated is in reality server itself which means it would be impossible(not sure but at least not necessary) to do such a thing. But anyone can easily build an app to collect posts from same communities, it does not require to play with activitypub, just lemmy api.
There is a really interesting dev discussion on this topic here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033
On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone's All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.
To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I'm not sure if there's a good way to fix that issue.
Keeping communities separate is the simplest way to go, tbh. Sharing karma could lead to weird brigades, like r/ScreenshotsAreHard cross-posting from every picture of screens on the Fediverse and then mass-downvoting from there.
To me, the best solution would be to implement multireddits. That way, you can have your cat multilemmy of 100 communities without affecting your main feed, but you could also do the same for related or identical communities. Plus, moderators could create a multilemmy and display it prominently in their sidebar.
Being able to subscribe to a multi would solve that issue
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Not something I'm interested in.
My instance aggressively defends the rights of trans folk and other minorities, so the moderators and the admins of any communities based on our instance will come down hard on transphobes and the like.
That's just not true of most of the rest of the threadiverse though, which means that merging just wouldn't work
How would this be any different then how it works now? Banned users would still be banned on your instance
Different than*
But it actually should be different from.
Oh, a wild grammar Nazi appears!
You're right though :-)
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Maybe the solution is more on the client side. An app should be able to let the user add communities from different instances and present them as one, maybe even merge comments from identical posts etc. Then if the user gets fed up with some instance not moderating or spamming, the user could then just remove that from his multi list.
Technically there's no way to please everyone on this, but there's also no reason why the apps couldn't present a meta-view of what is actually happening across instances, if that's what the user prefers. Most users don't want to see the gears turn.
In addition to the user experience it would also minimize any "damages" from any instance going down, because the multi list would remain active as long as any of the instances are up.
You're absolutely right! Easy and simple fix, which does not require any more decision rights, or extra responsibilities, being given to the instance operators.
Maybe you can subscribe to "news" and it gives you a submenu where you can tick which instances you want to include in your own selection of "news" community.
It still leaves the question of how it deals with crossposts of the same article to multiple instances.
No, and the difference between Beehw and Lemmy.world is why. Different people have different views about moderation and what is acceptable content.
There are two solutions to the real problem of duplicate content:
- Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
- Making crossposting a reference to the original post, not a copy. Mods would need to be able to block crossposts from specific communities, and remove crossposts to their sub.
These are solvable technical issues.
If community mods on different servers saw they have similar moderation guidelines, they could agree to federate. If they diverge in the future or disagree, they could defederate. Just like instances can defederate from previously federated servers today. It would be no more or less disruptive than defederation is today.
Heck, if done thoughtfully, it could even allow cross moderation, multiplying the number of mods for like-minded communities. The only mods who wouldn't appreciate that are the egotistical, power hungry, Redditish mods.
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This is a really good idea. Multi-instance communities would not just provide content redundancy, but also some load balancing. Each multi-instance community would become it's own little CDN. Duplicating the data across instances does pose a problem of bloat, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.
There are requests for this in the works. If I didn't have almost 1000 comments I would find the links but there's no search function for comments :/
Ah I found it!
https://lemmy.world/post/318115
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Each lemmy Server should've been it's own subreddit.
Definitely not.
For every individual community you would have to pay for a domain, maintain the instance, keep it updated, keeping it secure, and keeping it paid. That's really difficult already with a single server, let alone multiple for multiple servers and domains. These are also more points where data from other servers can be cached and get hacked/leaked or outright incompatible Lemmy versions.
It'd also still have the problem of multiple communities with the same topic, so it's not solving anything.
How do you expect people to migrate to Lemmy if these are the ridiculous hoops they're expected to do to start a community. Instead, they can just go to reddit and click a "create subreddit" button instead. What option do you think they'd choose?
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Who moderates it?
If communities have agreed to federate with each other, mod status should federate and mods of any of the federated communities should be able to moderate any content.
If it's one way (e.g. !technology@lemmy.world absorbs content from !technology@lemmy.ml but not the other way around) then the absorbing instance lemmy.world can moderate all content but it doesn't federate to lemmy.ml.
The problem with this was given by one of the lemmy devs—imagine @news on a tech focused instance and @news on a star trek focused instance, they are not going to have any crossover of content as they're effectively entirely different communities.
Similar would happen with local language differences like @football or @chips on an American vs a British instance
Although as a Brit I would completely be here for the chaos of that second scenario
No, this is completely solved by my suggestion.
I 100% agree that we shouldn't push communities together. Instead, give the option for a community to nominate other communities where the content should be aggregated into the community.
Add an option as to whether the mods of those remote communities also get mod powers on the local community.
Behind the scenes, keep everything separate, but when generating the list of posts, aggregate posts across any listed community.
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i can't decide if a one-way-moderation-scheme-type-thingy like that is beautifully simple solution, or one fraught with annoying hidden complications lol that's a sick idea.
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I don't know that one-way solves the problem...you could "Absorb content" with an overzealous user or a bot. It wouldn't subscribe the .world and .ml users to the same community.
Ideally you want someone to be able to subscribe to !technology@all or something.
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No, then there is no point to Lemmy being federated at all.
Better to just have each community develop their own flavor on the same topic imo
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I agree. For the people that dont want to see your home feed cluttered with duplicate content, it may be time to just start subscribing to your favorite Lemmy communities using RSS feeds for more control.
There's an RSS feed for anything on Lemmy using Open RSS. For instance, the RSS feed for this community is here:
https://openrss.org/lemmy.world/c/fediverse
You can also get feeds for comments on specific posts.
Gotta say I like merged communities better than just multireddits. The problem we're trying to solve is that one community of 1000 people is more than 10x better than 10 communities with 100 people, because instead of a bunch of posts or comments with less than 5 upvotes you get true content curation.
Would have to be voluntary and maybe there could be two levels, one where mods can only mod what is "truly" posted to their instance, and another where any mod can moderate anything in the combined community.
There is one major problem with the implementation that I hope you can understand with an example. Suppose there are three forums - motorsports@example1.com, motorsports@example2.net and motorsports@example3.org, which eventually start mirroring each other by default. Let's also suppose that a user is, for whatever reason, banned from example1.com but not from example2.net or example3.org. Should the user try to subscribe to motorsports@example2.net, must the latter honor the ban list from example1.com and ban the user as well, or should each instance have its own ban list, knowing well that users can evade bans by subscribing to another of the mirrored communities?
They can have their own ban lists and users on the instance as the banned user won’t see the same banned users posts just like how federation works now
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I like the idea of a distributed community where everyone can see posts from any other instance they federate with.
You could have two types of community, one federated local and one federated global, and the former acts like current communities, and the latter would act like a big pot everyone throws stuff into, and local instance mods could set which instances to accept and deny posts and comments from, and which instances to federate moderation actions from
I agree with this 100%. It would also help with QOL since I won't need to follow a bunch of the same communities spread out over numerous instances.
This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post.
I thought that’s more or less how it’s supposed to work now: if someone on instance A subscribes to a community on instance B, the community gets cached on instance A; and users there can post to it locally (and see each other’s posts) even if it temporarily can’t re-sync with instance B.
Is that not how it works in practice?
Yes power mods should be able to eat up keywords across the community. And I'm sure they various admins will all agree how to handle these communities once they don't like what's being posted.
I think a more reasonable approach would be client side. I haven’t thought out the implementation but I’m sure if you brought it to the attention of some devs that have clients they’d be open to the idea.
Good idea but this will lead to even more centralization if it's decided by the instances who their communities federates with.
The top ones will federate and leave the small instances out of the loop. Or put demands on other instances they have to fulfill to be part of the community federation.
It all ends up similar to Reddit in the end. Maybe it's unavoidable and we cant have properly decentralized now when it's centralized.
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