Thanks!!

Yes. Be patient. Assume that when Fediverse stuff is not working exactly right, it’s not you, it’s probably the Fediverse. These are early days of self-organized effort, like thousands of people trying to lash rafts and boats together in the middle of the ocean. They’re busy trying to make sure the whole thing doesn’t sink - don’t worry about the photos.

With kindness, I very much suggest against dismissing both the technology and your ability to understand it by calling it “mumbojumbo”. Don’t let the engineers make this stuff something only they can understand and work with.

I think you’re not entirely understanding what I’m saying - which is definitely not requiring everyone to be on the same platform.

Instead, what I’m suggesting is to give users control over meta-communities, just as admins have control over instances, and mods have control over communities. This would require that meta-communities could be built by individual users, ideally in a way that they could be shared (but still individually managed) much like a Spotify playlist or GitHub. Users could build their own meta-communities, or “subscribe” to meta-communities curated and shared by others. Additional QoL improvements would be the ability to check a meta-community to determine if a specific user could access/engage with that community, hence the package manager thing.

In this kind of framework, the broader Fediverse resists echo chambers and fosters diversity by allowing for the creation of instanced communities, while allowing users to determine how posts from those communities are organized and displayed.

If the Fediverse is taking a stance on the number of instanced communities that an individual should be able to read or participate in, why not make that explicit rather than creating these knee-high barriers?

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.

So, I think I misunderstood the first time I responded.

Basically, no - I wouldn’t want people centrally archiving posts. And, what I was originally proposing is more of a front end to multiple instanced communities.

Yeah, but the problem there is assuming - if I’m reading you correctly - that communities across instances are the same, sharing both the same name and the same intent/interest group. There needs to be someone doing the hard work of determining whether or not a given community belongs to a shared category, and that effort should be distributed.

I actually disagree with you, insofar as the network effect is limited through community fragmentation. This is, IMO, the biggest flaw in the fediverse for reddit escapees. I don’t have time to participate in 5 different communities, I have time to participate in one, and for there to be a critical mass of users providing constant content, the centralization is critical.

Now, if I could start making meta-magazines for myself… or better, creating meta-magazines which could then be shared via invite link, allowing for updates over time…

You know, like a package manager. That’s what I want. A package manager for Lemmy communities.

edit: Made this into a new post.

Yeah, I had managed most of the decline of Reddit by using RES to shift my browsing into two phases:

1. My personal front page, with all of my subscriptions (whitelist)
2. /r/all, through a subreddit and user blocklist (blacklist)

I was also very aggressive about blocking people with high karma, so the overall effect was that I was following my interests with the whitelist, but avoiding the echo chamber with the blacklist. Also hoping for enough traffic for something similar long term.

This has me missing /r/DanielTigerConspiracy…