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Is it possible to merge two existing communities on different federated servers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I believe more and more people will escape to lemmy sooner or later, and I already see 3 different communities for the same thing (selfhosted) here on lemmy. Time will tell which one will be the most active, but lets assume all of them will be equally active and the desire emerges to combine the two communities about the same thing, is that something possible or intended to be possible with federated services?

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

I think this is currently one of the biggest problem of Lemmy on the UX department. Non technical users from Reddit will only expect one "subreddit" for a theme, but if they search on Lemmy, they'll find more than one community with the same topic, and it'll confuse them and make them less likely to come back.

But that's the way how Fediverse work, so I don't think combining two communities should be done from the Fediverse side, but rather each Lemmy instance can curate a "playlist" or "multireddit" that has some of the biggest communities from the users' server and other federated servers about the same topic, and users can subscribe to the "playlist" rather than individual community.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The "multireddit" aspect also makes sense to me. Thank you for elaborating an alternative approach to what I had in mind. I don't know if such a feature is yet implemented, but for the time being, one could just subscribe to all the communities and it will be fine.

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

What would be nice is to have a system of tags or keywords that can be defined for a community. It would be trivial then to build a sort of multireddit where multiple communities can be aggregated by the tags they belong to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@blob42 kbin has the ability to aggregate content in to a community by hashtag (in a distinct tab) and it's incredibly useful. I think lemmy could really benefit from something similar

@g7s @SafetyGoggles

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

Thanks I didn't know kbin before. With the recent influx of users it's only a matter of time until these features are built.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, reddit really isn't much better in this department. It's not uncommon for multiple subs to exist for the same userbase (r/memes vs r/dankmemes, r/christian vs r/truechristian). Over time users figure out which is which, which is the main one, and which is for them

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

True, but they are all with different names, and they are not completely the same (as in different rules, more specific topic vs general topic, etc). But on Lemmy there is a possibility that two communities having the same exact topic and name for example [email protected] and [email protected], they are both discussing technology (and not any specific difference between them).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@SafetyGoggles The difference between those two is the moderation policies of the instance. Beehaw doesn't federate with the same instances that lemmy.ml does, and has an explicitly more inclusive and less generalist approach. They both cover the same ground, but you couldn't just merge them.

Having said that, it would be nice to see a user level feature that lets end users combine communities in to one "virtual" community in their interface.

@g7s @DudePluto

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

Yep, that's exactly what I mean. Coverung the same ground, but they are different communities with different moderation, so it can't be merged, but it make sense to group them together and view it as a "playlist". Just like Whitney Houston and ABBA don't collaborate to make albums, but it make sense for their songs to exist together in a playlist called "Songs from the 80s".

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

The down side of that would probably be duplicated content. Like if some major news happens for a topic reposts can already be really annoying and usually need moderator action to combine threads. Then there'd be that times however many communities exist for that same topic.