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?
That’s right. !Gaming@lemmy.ml is different from !Gaming@beehaw.org
Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn’t really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
well that’s confusing
Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
Why does “better” always mean “more complicated” on the Fediverse?
It’s just how the internet used to work before centralized US tech giants took over all comms platforms. Instead of one site, there are many to choose from.
Sometimes the best thing isn’t the easiest thing
wait, what about if you have two communities where mods and admins are fine. Are there any options to federate those communities?
all this time I was under impression that communities already federate
There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.
expired
The only “universal community search” tool that we know of so far, is https://browse.feddit.de/ .
But I’d be very open to adding this type of functionality into lemmy’s apps, and this UI too.
expired
yep, that does make sense from security / moderation standpoint, as one “god community” would probably get Bad Apple’d ™ .
but I would argue that “lol just manually opt-in to other communities” could be improved.
I will go search through issues on GitHub to see which of my ideas were already proposed and which still need to be opened 👍
You can follow both, that’s the federation.
Is it?
On Mastodon I can take a look at “Federated timeline” and see the posts from the people that I have not followed. Because instances already federate by themselves (due to some other user on my instance following the user on other instance) but yes, I see your point
Yep. Would be cool if we could subscribe to tags or topics so to speak. The 2 related gaming communities could then be grouped together in a federated view for the topic “Gaming”. At least for reading comments, not sure how posting would work.
good idea
You know, I actually really like the idea of tags. I don’t currently have an issue with manually subscribing to similar communities on different servers (I’m often just browsing “all” to see all communities and all servers). But being able to subscribe to a tag would be cool. Then I could more easily identify and opt out of the communities I don’t like that match those tags.
That would be cool
It is different for sure.
The “lemmy-verse” is really just a bunch of separate websites all running the same software that talks to each other. It’s like email, where you can send an email from a Gmail account, and receive it on an outlook account. The same concept being applied to social media now.
I feel like Lemmy/Kbin should indicate the host along with the community name. (i.e. @gaming@lemmy.ml)
They do, given it’s not on your instance. See the attached screenshot, the host website is in the same format you mentioned:
not in kbin, you have to mouse over the name to see the host
@schizanon They do exactly what you’re asking on both Lemmy and Mastodon. You just need to file a feature request to the kbin devs if their UI doesn’t surface that.
Unfortunately that breaks the concept of federation. I expected servers with good relationships with each other to replicate posts, otherwise what’s the point of federation?
The point of federation (on Lemmy) was to allow the different websites to talk to each other. So your lemmy.ml account can talk to most other websites that run lemmy software. This means create posts on external communities, comments, and be able to follow such communities. For now, the choice was made to keep communities local and not locally federated.
It sounds more like identity federation. I think it’s going to be very confusing for a lot of people.
They do replicate
So in this case @gaming@lemmy.ml and @gaming@beehaw.org are two different communities, both of which can be followed, and both of which federate to anyone that follows them.
It’s similar to the way multiple closely related subs can exist on reddit. And it will resolve in the same way, with the users ultimately deciding
What you are describing is just a form of “remote following”, which is merely local caching of some content from another instance. As you wrote, each @gaming is an entirely independent community, even if the moderators are the same people across multiple servers. If an instance is shut down the community is gone. If the instance decides to throttle access and start charging money users have to pay or abandon the community. In short, this is not a significantly better user experience than traditional online forums. I’d rather have real federation.
That’s the way ActivityPub federation works. It’s built on ActivityPub.
There isn’t one that offers federation in the way you want it
Makes sense, thank you!
How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?
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 processNo, communities are the main federated item in lemmy.
For example, !calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone is also viewable from here: https://lemmy.ml/c/calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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.
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?
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
!newscommunity, like:wales.lemmy.com/c/newswellington.lemmy.com/c/news
This is a good way of framing the concept.
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. :)
That’s possible with Lemmy too. Just make sure you select the “All” filter when browsing instead of just the “Local” filter and it should show you all the federated posts.
I think the point is more that the federation is visible and confusing to your average end user.
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.
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.
Hmm true that is a concern
I’m just speculating here, but I remember way back when reddit was just a bunch of shitty html css and blue links. People would joke it would weed some times of people out
Maybe the complicated nature of federated web apps will drive away a similar crowd
That’s actually a really good point. There’s an optimum number of users that’s obviously orders of magnitude higher than where Lemmy is at right now, but it’s probably an order of magnitude lower than reddit’s current position. If reddit’s changes could drive the most technologically literate 10-20% of reddit’s user base over here, that might be a very good thing indeed.
Well, one would be named
!Community@domain.comAnd the other
!Community@website.com
you don’t have to, you can just sub the major ones
Do instances “subscribe” to get the communities of other instances? Or how does it work the “all” filter?
Instances don’t subscribe. People follow federated communities. So you can type !gaming@beehaw.org into the search bar here, and subscribe to it.
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.
Something I noticed. If you visit “All”, it contains posts from multiple servers, so that can help with discovery.
It’s not a big deal, as the posts to these communities and thus the communities should be in your ALL tab anyways. As long as someone on your server already follows them.
they are federated in the sense that they’re an email-like entity. it’s just they’re not all merged together I suppose.
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.
You can have multis, and you can subscribe to multiples at once.
I have about twenty different gaming subs on all different servers subscribed, so I’ll see any one of them in my feed.
Does it matter which one posted what I’m looking at?
Not really.
So that’s how you do it. Nice so you can also combine closely-related topics. I do think as a new user (like myself) it’s a bit daunting that I can’t just subscribe to 1 of each topic but potentially have to go seek out the multiple versions of it on different servers, let alone keep up in case new servers come around.
Maybe there could be a centralized list of multis you can subscribe to and these would be maintained for you, or something like that.
So, the way that I figured it, you could have the !something@someserver concept, which I call groups (lemmy calls them communities), and the collision of those (say, !something with no server), would be called “regions” because they’d be several competing communities trying to use a shared resource. Moderation of a region would be a nightmare.
You could probably make a reddit-esque “multireddit” style view that represents the “regions” concept - just know that you are posting to a particular community with particular mods, in the end.
Just pick the one with most activity.
Also be aware that Beehaw doesn’t federate with Lemmy.world, the biggest instance in the Lemmyverse.