I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?

  •  testman   ( @testman@lemmy.ml ) 
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    261 year ago

    O wait, the whole federation allows federation of just users and not communities?
    So all this time I have been looking at posts just on the main instance and not posts across all instances?
    fugggggggg so now I have to go search for communities of same name on all other instances as well and subscribe to them? ok, fine. How do I do this? there should really be something that automates this process

      • I would argue that “viewable from” is a far cry from truly federated. The fact that I have to subscribe to infinitely many individual communities to see all, say, “Technology” content across all of lemmy seems like a near-fatal flaw to me.

        •  Ada   ( @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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          141 year ago

          The same problem existed on reddit, and it will resolve in the same way. There are often overlapping communities, but ultimately, the users will decide what works, and one or two of them will win out.

            • What’s the point of federation then?

              There’s not just one server or one entity that controls everything. If one server shuts down it doesn’t shut down the entire service. And even though having multiple communities on multiple servers named the same might not be ideal, it’s also a feature. If you really don’t like the mods of one community on one server, you can join a similar community on a different server. You can think of the servers like cities. Every city has a game store, and this way you can access all the game stores at once. You might have a favorite community on a favorite server and that might be where you create your new posts, but you can still read and participate in the discussions going on in similar communities on all the different servers.

              • People should really see naming conflicts, not as a negative, but a positive.

                If you have two cities that run their own lemmy servers, say Wales and Wellington, they can each have their own !news community, like:

                • wales.lemmy.com/c/news
                • wellington.lemmy.com/c/news
              • You can think of the servers like cities. Every city has a game store, and this way you can access all the game stores at once. You might have a favorite community on a favorite server and that might be where you create your new posts, but you can still read and participate in the discussions going on in similar communities on all the different servers.

                Great analogy. One of the great things about the internet of old though, was that you automatically got exposed to all of the ideas out there, not just the ones in your city. :)

            • It avoids centralisation. You can simply defederate from nazi instances, and the whole platform can’t be sold out from underneath you.

              And for someone like me, who is trans and runs several instances for the gender diverse community, I’m able to curate the experience so my users don’t experience constant hate and aggression. So if someone is posting transphobic stuff that doesn’t get actioned on their home instance, I can block that user (or their whole instance) from mine even if I’m not a moderator of the community.

          •  gnoop   ( @gnoop@lemmy.ml ) 
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            41 year ago

            That or what happens is that everyone goes with their local server’s version and the federation isn’t as heavily user. At present on lemmy.ml, you’re presented with Local by default and you have to actively switch to All to go outside the server. It seems a bit as if they’re selling the idea of federation while also not promoting the idea of federation once you’re logged in by having ‘All’ be the default view.

        • Hmm yea I don’t like it much either, however, I remember /r/technology got progressively worse and the alternative was just a shittier subreddit with a slightly different name.

          Unison would be nice, but it’s not so different from reddit come to think of it

          • I’m not sure anything is different here in that respect. I’m still learning my way around, but are communities not still autocratic fiefdoms controlled entirely by some combination of the server admins and moderators? It will just be a shittier community with the same name.

          •  pe1uca   ( @pe1uca@lemmy.one ) 
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            41 year ago

            Yeah, I understand that, it’s why I used subscribe in quotes since I didn’t know to phrase it better.
            My question is, how an instance knows about the communities of other instances so they appear when changing from “local” to “all”?
            Is it only until a user searches for them in that instance? Before that both instances are unknown to each other?
            Or is there a config so one instance tries to always be updated of other instances?

            • Federation is based on a push methodology, that happens after a subscribe. The flow is that I subscribe to a federated community, and that community’s server now knows my activitypub id, and can push community posts and comments to my servers inbox. The connection happens after that first subscribe.

    •  gnoop   ( @gnoop@lemmy.ml ) 
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      41 year ago

      It’s a loose federation of communities. Each server has its own communities that are pushed out. Meaning you can end up with 20 different gaming communities as each one will list the server they’re part of. It’s not like usenet where the newsgroup name is the same regardless of what server you’re on.