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?
I mean, anything is possible with enough programming skills and an API. And I did find multireddits to be very useful on Reddit. But I don’t think creating a “one true meta-community that replaces r/whatever” is either feasible or desirable.
Firstly, what your talking about want even possible on Reddit. Subreddits are infamous for fracturing over mod drama. Look at the Game of Thrones/ASOIAF subreddits. There’s the main sub r/ASOIAF which is for any media from the ASOIAF series which split into r/PureASOIAF for JUST talk about the books. R/GameofThrones was for talking about the TV show, but users hated how strict rules were for spoilers, so users went and made r/freefolk which got more popular than the original sub.
Second, at a fundamental level, Lemmy and any Fediverse social media is about decentralization. Even if you were able to develop such a tool over the top of Lemmy/Kbin, a meta-community wouldn’t really be centralized, as each community would have its own moderation team with its own rules. If one community defederates from any of the others, it would break the meta-community. Additionally, instance admins and community moderators might also oppose the tool if it brings an influx of outside users who aren’t subscribed to posting and commenting in their communities.
On both Reddit and Lemmy, anyone at any time can make their own subreddit/instance and host any new communities they want. People are going to organically pick whichever community fits the thing they’re looking for. That’s not always the same thing, and that’s a good thing. Some people want strict moderation and enforcement of being on-topic, some people don’t. Wishing your favorite subreddit hadn’t shut down or splintered doesn’t undo that it happened. Wanting an “official” community for your old favorite subreddit is unlikely, but possible. Wanting your community to be the “official” community across all of Lemmy & Kbin is unreasonable.
My suggestion is to hang out and see how the Fediverse works. Subscribe to some places and migrate your account if you don’t like the vibe of an instance. But Lemmy (and BeeHaw especially) aren’t trying to recreate Reddit exactly. This is our version of a link aggregate social media site, and sometimes not being like Reddit is intentional.
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.
There is a tool from @0x2a to help migrate communities from one account to another: lemmy-community-copy.
It’s not a far stretch to imagine that something like it could also extract and package a user’s communities to share with others.
(This is a cross-posted comment because I forgot about the temporary defederation of sh.itjust.works by beehaw.org.)