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Lemmy super communities? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is probably the wrong place for this, but is there any intention to have something like super communities, where the same community exists on multiple instances but is treated like just one?

Ie, if you sub to asklemmy on world, you see content from whatever other servers have asklemmy.

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[–] dual_sport_dork 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This is one of those things that sounds simple and intuitive on paper ("just" take all these communities of the same name from disparate instances, smash them together so they all display on the same page) but once you start thinking about the details it becomes clear that it'd be a logistical nightmare and a clusterfuck to actually implement.

For a start, moderation would become diabolically complex.

If multiple communities across instances are merged, each has its own moderators. Who can moderate which content? Everyone? Only the moderators for the instance in which the content originated?
If it's the former, what's to stop a rogue moderator from a bad instance from merging their community and then deleting content/banning users who aren't theirs?
What happens if a user gets banned from one instance, but other instances have merged content in this community under which that user is not banned?
Who decides what community and instancewide rules apply to the merged instance of that community, which will inherently include users from outside their instance?
Who sets what the banner and sidebar look like, considering that nobody from any given instance can "own" the entire supercommunity?
Etc.

I think the only way this could possibly work at present is if were client-side, i.e. you can create your own supercommunity by merging content into a single page on your own device, but purely for display and in a read-only fashion. This would not provide the implicit benefit I think you're angling for, though, which would be solving the Fediverse fragmentation problem.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The way I've been thinking about would be to have the "meta community" be a separate thing from each individual community. Each individual community would opt in to joining, and would retain their own moderation and users, but the posts would be sort of cross posted to the meta community. The meta community mods largely just deal with removing posts that don't fit. All the comments go on the original instance of the post and are moderated there, so the meta community mods might be allowed to moderate those comments on an opt in basis.

The idea is that it's for very similar communities across different instances, but because it's opt in there are probably other uses. The hope would be that each individual community could retain their vibe, while the meta community would have more of a firehose of content, and possibly filter some of those topics back down for more in depth discussion.

I'd also love for individual users to be able to group communities for themselves, and for those to be shareable, which seems much quicker to implement.

[–] Starbuck 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I feel like a meta community is a clients side feature with server side hints.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Considering all the limitations, and the hyper-fragmented nature of the Fediverse, maybe it'd be worth adding a feature to "redirect" or "symbolically link" communities. For example, [email protected] would just open [email protected] (possibly with a notification banner or similar to clairify). Throw in some extra tools to improve moderation across instances and you'd have 90% of the benifit of "super-communities" without the complexity.

I know you can do this by just making a locked community with a post describing this, but its a very clunky solution, and given how fragmented the Fediverse is, and how unlikely that is to change (given the structure) it might be worth having a dedicated method.