After a week on Lemmy/kbin/beehaw 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?
Took me a bit to get back to this one.
I disagree, and suspect either you were unaware of the functionality or (like me) never used it. It was called multireddits. I’m also all for the fracturing of communities, but only if users are provided with tools for managing and categorizing those communities.
Beyond that, I’m also fine with federation/defederation breaking defined meta-communities for specific users, as users can always go make their own meta-community or choose a different instance to call home. This would substantially provide power to users over their own experience. In this framework admins control federation, mods control communities, users control meta-communities. The decisions of admins effect everyone on an instance, the decisions of mods effect everyone in a community, the decisions of users effect only the flow of their own data (and those that wish to follow their categorization scheme).
I don’t want an “official” community. Not at all. I want a huge diversity of communities that all work slightly differently - but I want the option of displaying and interacting with those communities within a single feed, should I choose.
More specifically in my own personal case - which I suspect is many of us - I want a huge diversity of different community instances, but I also want tools to help manage the flow of data that comes from those instances. I have time for 3-4 feeds, I don’t have time for 20-30.