On federation and fragmentation
FlockofCats@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 16 points – I’ve seen a number of posts stating that they are worried that multiple instances will have overlapping magazines, like “Technology“. It’s true this will happen. But I don’t think it is a problem.
One thing I’ve learned from Mastodon, and I think it will apply to kbin as well, is that you don’t need to post for EVERYBODY on the internet. At some point, there’s a number — 1000 people, 10,000 people, or 100,000 people — where there are enough users where you can have an effective community and a nice conversation, without being so big that everything goes to sh*t.
In real life, we don’t expect to know everybody. We interact with people close to us. Maybe, this is fine in a federated community as well.
And, of course, there is still the chance that post will get really popular and percolate through the fediverse, for example, into the multiple “Technology” magazines.
In sum, I think the fediverse model will build multiple, interlinked, smaller but sustainable communities. If all you want is “reach”, it won’t be for you. But I think it will be good if you want community.
Some way to group instances together would be pretty nice. Is if you have two of the same community on different servers, you could group them and present them to a new user as a single community.
There is a feature request at kbin's repository regarding this feature.
I have added feedback to it personally.
There are ideas for users grouping together communities/magazines (from kbin or Lemmy or others) for themselves, and for moderators of magazines to include other communities, or even for admins of instances to group communities together at a site level.
The main problem is, that this needs to be implemented on the fediverse level and not only on kbin. While it would help, even if it only exists on kbin, it would still be impossible with lemmy communities.
But if it were implemented and seemed like a solid idea, perhaps other instances(?) Would follow suit.
Putting all the various "gaming" communities on kbin and Lemmy together on one page is a nice QOL feature but I'm not sure it's a good idea to present them to users as all the same thing. Gaming@kbin and gaming@lemmy and gaming@beehaw are different groups with different rules managed by different people and if users don't know that it's going to cause confusion in the long run
reddit solved this problem by letting users make "multireddits" where you can subscribe to a bunch of subreddits that are all the same topic (but different subreddits). Something like that could work. like lemme see "all gaming communities across lemmy/kbin" or something.