I think that's more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the neighborhood; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities. In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It's ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get off from your preferred one. The latter is laudable in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI's.
Comment on probably my biggest gripe with Lemmy right now. Feels like I'm just stuck in a loop.
akilou@sh.itjust.works 10 months agoYes, exactly this. Using Reddit as an anology, each Subreddit should be it’s own instance, rather than having duplicate subreddits across many instances.
wjrii@kbin.social 10 months ago
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The problem is people that would be willing to run and moderate a sub on reddit are not all capable or willing to host an instance for that thing.
wjrii@kbin.social 10 months ago
Yeah, I mean once it became clear the the Threadiverse would be populated by tens of thousands of self-exiles from Reddit who left for a bunch of issues, relatively few of them directly related to how federation should work (i.e. people like me), it was sort of bound to happen to any general interest instance.
The Star Trek and the security instances (and even lemmygrad) are probably more how the model was envisioned. I'm not entirely sure it's "better," but it is better suited to the infrastructure that was in place.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah a big part of the reason why this is happening is because the vast majority of people coming here don’t give a shit about federation they just want a version of Reddit that isn’t Reddit.
I guarantee if another Reddit alternative starts growing that is centralized and more aligned with how reddit was, these people will leave for it.
buffaloseven@kbin.social 10 months ago
That's not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that's linked it. Then you'd see the link once, but could see the post from each community that's linked it rolled up underneath it.
Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect "hot links" in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.
realitista@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah we need something like multireddits which have collections of communities across instances that can be subscribed to instead of the individual communities themselves. So your worldnews could be a single subscription of all the worldnews communities across lemmy.world, beehaw, etc. De-duping for extra credit!
pqdinfo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A lot of this is purely teething issues related to (1) the fact federation seems difficult to understand to some people and (2) the fact it’s early and people keep thinking “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a WORLD NEWS forum?” and they create it without realizing that actually a ton of other people have already created one.
It’s not like Reddit didn’t have a ton of duplicate or overlapping subs.
Maybe it should be easier to merge subs and instance admins could maybe encourage it if there’s no obvious reason why they have a sub that’s clearly a duplicate of one on another server.