As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] etc.
If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don’t think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.
I’m not opposed to some sort of client side conglomeration, but almost every person I’m seeing isn’t looking for a tool to use on their own to customize their feed - they want every iteration of a community name automatically congealed into a single community for them to sub to a la Reddit…
Which can’t be done without a central authority. Some people argue makinf a new community which scrapes every iteration of a community name automatically, but that’s just content theft at that point.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
By people creating their own groups of subs I mean a group saved on their private app or profile, not some other huge functionality to the system creating lists that is shared publicly, that would require a central authority an major changes. Heck, an app like jerboa could probably do it itself. The people that want to migrate every iteration of a subject into one don’t get the fediverse. But being able to add like communities to a list yourself gets rid of the fractured communities downside of the fediverse. If you stumble on another community on the subject you add it to that catagory/group. It would also increase the users investment and loyalty to their account.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.
Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.