I’ve been on Lemmy for 10 days now and I really enjoy it. The federation is really cool, but compared to Reddit it does have a downside: fragmentation of communities.
I think it would be really cool to be able to combine the feeds of the community Random_topic@example_instance_1 with Random_topic@example_instance_2 etc.
This could work well for reading, but I realize that posting is more difficult. So when posting you should be able to choose on what instance you want to post to the Random_topic ‘community group’.
What do you think?
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I think a voluntary sync between instances/communities is the next step. I think you’re proposing a client-side solution, which would be helpful, but a back-end solution that allows instances (or at least communities) to sync everything will be a better experience, and help prevent one instance from “owning” too much of the traffic.
So on the server side, it would be like how DNS servers work to “propograte” the hostname data so that users are served the same content but distributing the load between multiple servers?
Edit: I think I’m actually just describing CloudFlare 😅
Yeah, great analogy.
there are already few relevant issues open on GitHub about this. Go in there and voice your suggestions there as well.
I’m not a programmer and have very limited Github experience, but I’ll have a look.
There’s an open GitHub ticket for something analogous multireddit’s: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818, but as you note that’s really just a read-only view.
People talk about community fragmentation like Lemmy invented it. There are TONS of duplicate and overlapping communities on Reddit. There’s /r/tech and /r/technology, /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, a zillion aita clone subs. Dupes are everywhere.
IMO what we need to manage community dupes is actually better community discovery. What makes duplicate communities less of a problem in Reddit is that when a community has good mods and starts to accumulate membership, it gets pushed up the search rankings in a snowball effect. Other subs grow less active and the well-manged one dominates. Remote community discovery is so poor on Lemmy that it’s a total tossup which option you find in the results… which currently makes the dupe situation a “problem”. But it’s my belief that if community discovery was better, dupe communities would mostly naturally aggregate into a few well run options.
