After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to multiple similar communities to individual users.

While the diversity that instanced communities provide is a significant benefit, I guarantee most users - including myself - are just waiting for frontrunners to emerge. This will eventually kill most of the potential upside to instanced communities, which arguably should develop in slightly different ways, to specifically push against echo chambers.

As far as I've been able to tell, there's no good way to create meta-communities either collectively or individually. So, rather than rebuild reddit functionality (that I would only find useful here in the Fediverse, due to the fragmentation) I had a thought.

Would it be possible to create either explicit Lemmy/kbin functionality that allowed both for the creation and centralized updating of meta-communities?

The thought would be that individuals and groups could effectively add new community instances to centrally managed lists - like a package manager, of sorts. Users could generate lists of communities/magazines, and then (if the meta-community was public) invite people to subscribe to that list for future updates. Upon joining a or running an update to an existing meta-community, the system would check to see if the current instance and user was properly federated in order to engage with that specific instance of the community.

I'll admit, I'm new, and haven't dug deep enough into any of the technical documentation to see how much of this is possible, and I'm willing to bet it could be layered on top of Lemmy/kbin via plugins and apps. That said, I'm not sure that's how it should be done in the future. Thoughts?

edit: more clear detail from comments below:

The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, [email protected] and [email protected], both instances of “android” communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two “android” communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same “community”.

The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to “update” their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.

The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The way I picture this is by letting communities have some sort of "partner communities" listing. If mods of games@xyz decide they like the content of games@abc, and gaming@123, they add those communities as "partners" (perhaps those communities have to accept which in turn adds games@abc as their partner). Then, when any user subscribes to one partnered community, they also become subscribed by proxy to the others, and begin to see posts from all 3.

This helps smaller communities piggyback on the success of willing larger communities and gain a bit of visibility as well, which should encourage growth of each partner so smaller ones don't just die out.

Communities can "unpartner" at any time, in which case users would only remain subscribed to the one they originally selected. And of course, users could explicitly block any of the partnered communities if they don't want to see the whole set.

[–] fisk 3 points 1 year ago

I like this idea as well, if it would do a different kind of work at a different community level. The thing that's missing here is that it recenters control at the mod level, rather than at the user level - and I can see how that might be more appropriate, if I'm also enamored with the idea that individual users would gain access to a new kind of influence (should they get popular enough with their community sorting).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is a tool to help migrate communities from one account to another to use when moving yourself to another instance called lemmy-community-copy.

It's not a far stretch to imagine that something like it could also extract and package a user's communities to share with others.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like subscribing to a hashtag would be better. That way you could view it regardless of where it was posted so you could participate in the discussion.

[–] rouxdoo 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like this is the built-in #fediverse way of doing things here. Rather than try to force a vast range of users (#kbin, #lemmy, #mastodon, #pixelfed, etc.) to hew to a reddit-like method of aggregating interests to your preferred method of browsing you will have to change your method of discovery to match the platform you're on to find what you want. #notreddit

[–] fisk 2 points 1 year ago

Not sure you've bothered to read the post, as you've strawmanned my argument into "Why isn't the fediverse reddit?" and failed to address any of my points about the fragmentation of communities versus the creation of echo chambers.

Beyond that, I've seen maybe 10% of comments or posts out here with hashtags, unless I'm missing something (I could be, I'm new!). I also assume that means the only mechanism for finding groupings of posts is then through search? That's a terrible user experience.

For someone so loudly proclaiming this isn't reddit, you're certainly making it feel like I'm back there.

[–] fisk 1 points 1 year ago

Hashtags aren't bad - but I've seen so few posts/comments with hashtags, and... there's no mechanism for subscribing to hashtags via Lemmy/kbin as far as I've been able to tell?

Additionally they require users to tag their own content, rather than just post to a community - why leave all of that to the poster?

[–] Molecular0079 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What you're describing is really similar to the "Spaces" concept in Matrix. Spaces are groups of chatrooms that can be created and joined by anyone. They can be public or private and the chatrooms don't have to be on the same Matrix instance either.

[–] fisk 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly! Except that doesn't exist over here in Lemmy.

[–] Molecular0079 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be a great feature request! I would use the heck out of that feature. You should totally submit that to the project's GitHub!

[–] fisk 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks!! I posted here thinking it would "be the place to have a discussion" but then realized - hey, GitHub already does that. I'll get over there soon, if I'm enjoying the discussion here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There is nothing preventing the creation of meta-communities other than writing the code to put things together.

Using the Activitypub protocol a group is nothing else but an actor that announces ("retweets") every message that is tagged with its name.

To have meta groups you would have an actor that subscribes to a list of groups and announces ("retweets") anything that shows up in its feed.

Currently you could make a sort of meta group by having a bot user account that subscribes to several communities and announces everything it sees. The only problem is that Lemmy doesn't yet let users follow other users or retweet content.

[–] shaunj 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm having trouble following this idea. Are you thinking like a basic directory that is centralized, or something else? Your metaphor of a package manager eludes me too. Could you maybe provide a concrete theoretical example of what you mean?

[–] Tsrich92 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think they're asking for a way to aggregate like communities from different instances. I'm seeing some of the drawbacks now as I have to subscribe to 5 similar communities on different instances. Would be nice if we could aggregate those into one based on the topic

[–] fisk 3 points 1 year ago

That's what I'm asking, but with a little new functionality. Either way the core thing I want is meta-communities, aggregating whatever communities users might want into a single feed.

[–] fisk 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure (and hi!)

The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, [email protected] and [email protected], both instances of "android" communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two "android" communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same "community".

The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to "update" their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.

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