Lemmy

Here's what this sounds like to me:

[email protected] and [email protected] do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.

It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn't work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That's okay! It's okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!

There's no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.

Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it's really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user's first guess must be right.

Remote communities do show the fully qualified community name in the url though. /c/[email protected] should show the same thing on all instances.

Silently combining communities, which may each have different content policies, is rife with potential for user confusion. Also, there's no guarantee that communities with the same name across servers have the same aims — to use your "piracy" example, c/piracy on one instance may be enthusiasts of literally sailing the seas wearing peg-legs and looting ships, or people who have sarcastically adopted the name for their fandom of those Johnny Depp movies, or something else entirely. Or your desired kind of piracy may take place in communities named differently across servers, whether it's due to someone else registering the community name first, local slang/translation, etc. Ironically, I think what you're asking for is a different type of centralization — centralization of namespace across servers.

The suggestion is interesting, but you may be expecting something out of Lemmy that it is not, as communities are individually hosted and managed. It does sound like there may be potential for Lemmy instances or client apps to allow a user to combine communities, multireddit-style, for their own personal usage. That would be cool and useful.

Is /trees for weed or arborists? Who moderates and decides? You have the same problem on that other site with things like /games vs /gaming vs /gamers vs true_gaming etc.

To me the bigger problem is discoverability. If there is nothing community at /piracy on my local instance something should ve done to show options of communities in the fediverse. Something like an integrated version of browse.feddit.de.

It's the same as in reddit, you can find r/unpopularopinion and r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, or off my chest, or shower thoughts (with the UL one).
It'd be like asking those communities should only have one feed.
Similarly here you can have [email protected] and [email protected] and you'd have to decide which one is more aligned with your idea of what the community should be.
And if you don't like it, then you can create a new community in another instance without having to fight for the same name (I could create one in my instance like [email protected])

Jfc.

This is going to happen a lot as Lemmy grows. There will be more communities with the same name over different instances. Though the full canonical name is the actual name of the community, not just the prefix name. For example [email protected] and [email protected] are two different communities with two different names.

There's no federation wide rules about reusing the prefix name of a community. You can have as many repeats as people create. In other words you can't duplicate names on a particular instance, but the entire Fediverse doesn't care because it differentiates by instance name. It's just the nature of how the decentralized architecture works.

I have a number of duplicates I subscribe to and it's transparent when I look at the front page of subscribed communities. However I have to look at each duplicate individually when selecting a community to view. An option to look at communities in groups would be helpful. I think that's a reasonable feature to incorporate. It could be as simple as adding a checkbox to select more than one community to view at a time.

I don't think it will ever be possible to physically merge communities across multiple instances at a base level. It's likely something that exceeds scope of design.

Thats one of the biggest issues. Its a big change of thinking from a centralised server like reddit etc.

All i want is to be able to group communities maybe call it a town even if its local only

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I've been saying this for a few days now, but alas! Downvoted, scoffed. I just don't get it. I am not advocating for anything other than true decentralization, which is broken in more than one way with the lemmyverse. Defederation is not even the issue. No, I don't want nazi communities. No, I don't have anything against admins. I just want to see the system work as it's touted to work. People are so protective of their communities, and rightfully so, but we need to think hard about the differences between moderation and exclusion. One can foster a safe community, the other will just isolate.

I thought that was the whole point. If you want different instances to fully mirror each other, they shouldn't be different domains to begin with, but cloned servers with unified management. Otherwise, you go to the specific community on the specific instance, which you can do from any federated instance.

Over time, communities on specific instances will become the "global" default by popularity.

I love this idea. You should put it up as a recommendation on the lemmy GitHub if it's not there already.

I like the idea, but it should be opt-in. So communities can decide if they want to "combine" with other communities. And I would go a step further and not force exact naming schemes.