That popup idea is something that could work, and something that one could suggest on Lemmy’s github for implementation.
Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
The problem is that the niche community exist. In fact it probably exists several times, one in each instance with a small number of followers. Which makes really hard to go and decide in which community you want to invest.
It’s one fundamental problem of federative systems and to be solved some of the federal nature need to be partially given away, but I think is necessary. I propose two solutions:
- Automatic merging of communities. All communities with the same name within a federation are de facto replicated. So a post in any community just replicate in all. It will make it seem like there’s only one community.
2 Discourage. Everytime you try to create a community that already exists in other instance a pop up appears that encourage you to just go to the other community. For already duplicated communities messages are sent to concentrate in the biggest one.
Microw@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Sabata11792@ani.social 3 weeks ago
Kbin had a cool feature where you could see other sub’s where a link was reposted to, was great for finding what’s active or dead.
Wish that one made it to Lemmy.
Blaze@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
That’s already the case on the Lemmy web UI and lost og the apps
Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I don’t agree with either of those. Just not what federation is. A bettet solution would be to implement a category section that you can edit or automatically parses similar names.
CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah I don’t agree with that either considering that any Joe Blow could essentially snipe a community either with an unpopular instance federating and posting garbage (which mods on other instances can’t even remove) or by using a popular instance to create that duplicate community and then posting content there that even more people are likely to see and siphon away from an already established community.
Second option is also a bad idea, the less guardrails the better.
My solution is one I’ve discussed with many people on Lemmy now. What we need are topics or in other words, the ability for reposts on followed communities not to be seen more than once. If that feature also allows for federating the actual repost to where by default all comments to to the same thread, that would be perfect.
This enables people to post to a main community and a niche community at the same exact time without spamming members who follow both communities. Then the main community gets alerted of the niche communities existence and the niche community benefits from the content.
That way we develop this sort of hub system that’s really nice where the general communities like a gaming community aren’t just generic, they feature posts from all niches in that sphere and alert you to new stuff you might enjoy. That’s my rant.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I like the topic system. Allows to post and see without worries of duplication.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I like it, but that’s not the model Lemmy was built around.
It’d be neat if, instead of posting to a community you posted to your instance and tagged your post with a topic, and then instances could contain topic aggregators with moderators that moderated their local view of the topic.
But even that comes with challenges around protection at-risk people like kids, where nobody is fully able to control the discourse around them.