I'm learning about the Fediverse and am confused about how federation is supposed to work. I understand that there can be communities with the same name in different instances, with different content. But I also understand you can subscribe to another instance's community. For example, there are sysadmin commnunities at lemmy.world, lemmy.one, and beehaw.org (among others). If we focus on one specific community, let's say [email protected], we can find that community from any of the instances. If I go to each instance and look at [email protected] from each one, I can see the same pinned post is at the top of each one instance's view ("Calling all /r/sysadmin reddit refugees!" by DarraignTheSane).

Great!

However, if I look at that pinned thread from each of the three instances, the comment stream is different. The post itself is the same, but the comment thread is a mixed bag. Some comments seem to appear in multiple instances while others only in one or two, but never all three

lemmy.world shows 11 comments lemmy.one shows 6 comments beehaw.org shows 4 comments

On lemmy.world, the second newest comment says "Nice! It feels like home." This comment also shows up on lemmy.one however not on beehaw

The newest comment on lemmy.world says "yeeey" but doesn't appear in any other instance's view of [email protected]

This is just one specific example. Are you not supposed to get the same content, when looking at the same community, regardless of what instance you are logged into when viewing it? Or am I missing something?

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[–] timespace 20 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I think the multiple communities of the same topic across different instances is a mistake honestly. Information/discussion should be concentrated, not spread about a bunch of places.

I read on here they are working on a method that would allow communities across instances to merge. I hope that happens.

Imo, federation should mean the same communities are replicated across all instances. If an instance wants to house its own content, they can maybe make a community that isn’t replicated to all the others but accessible nonetheless by everyone (ie Piracy community, maybe not every instance owner wants to replicate that to their instance).

I dunno, the bifurcation of communities just seems like a mistake and less efficient than everyone in the same place sharing knowledge and ideas.

[–] 64bitUser 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Having multiple communities in different instances for the same topic is a controversial topic that I haven't yet settled on an opinion about. However, what I'm talking about here is that the content for the same community shows different across various instances. That seems very broken to me

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

There are two things in play here. One is that beehaw has lemmy.world defederated due to high moderation volume, so that connection is broken. This is part of how federation works and is to some extent inevitable. Because it's splitting community userbases, however, I do think that defederation decisions can be more fraught on lemmy than they are on Mastodon in some ways. The only solutions here are, either the moderation load is reduced to the point beehaw refederates, or moderation tools improve to make it easier for them to manage the load, or you migrate to an instance that isn't defederated.

I do think it strongly incentivizes mainstream community creators to set up shop on instances that are both large and well-moderated, to make it the most likely that the most users will be able to access that community. (Because other instances won't want to defederate.)

The other thing is that some servers that are federated still have issues with comments getting lost. This is a technical issue that is supposed to be improved with the new version of Lemmy. How I see it manifest on blahaj is that with some of the busier servers, especially lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, some comments never make it over to blahaj.

There is a workaround, sort of, which is that if I search for a specific comment by URL, that alerts blahaj to its existence, and then it appears. But I have to know the comment exists and care enough to go the trouble.

[–] Mettigel 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

We need a lemmy client that has the option to "merge" communities of different instances on the app level.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

There's already a Lemmy issue for that. Presumably one for Kbin too, though I'm not aware of it specifically at this point.

[–] andobando 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ive been thinking about how to do this but the issue I see related names don't necessarily mean the same type of community.

/c/latex on one community and /c/latex on another can be VERY different things, so you need to let people create their own groupings, but that seems like too much work.

But going by name is perhaps a good start.

[–] Mettigel 2 points 2 years ago

You could give the user the option to do it manually

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Can't disagree more.

There's a very toxic dynamic on Reddit that many people don't want to acknowledge. Once a space hits a certain threshold of users, discussions die, and everything switches to bids for attention. These bids don't further anything but further bids for attention.

[–] andobando 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I dunno about this. I REALLY like the idea of fragmenting the whole user base. When a community gets too big it ceases to be a community.

Why does the whole internet need to see then same content, and be a collective hivemind?

Whats wrong with the current user size we have on this current community? Id even argue its too big already. If it blows up by 100x we run back to having posts with 10k replies, 20 or so which everyone will read. Its a really dumb system

[–] Poggers 2 points 2 years ago

I like both, in their own time and place. For memes, news, etc? I don't usually need to comment on those posts, but I do like there to be a steady stream of new content from a bunch of people. In that case, I'd love there to just be a bigger community, even if I don't feel like my comments (if I made them) would be read.

However, if I'm trying to have discussions about Magic, Zelda, teaching, or cooking, then I would rather have the smaller community to actually have discussions. Even it that case though, having one place as a "news aggregator" for that hobby would be nice.