we have "sub-lemmys" but what we are missing for lack of a better term is "dom-lemmys", hear me out

KittyCat@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 202 points –

What we're really lacking on the ui end is a way to see groups of identical communities that are on different federated platforms. Hence the idea of a dom-lemmy. The way it would work is lets say you search for a cat community called "cats", there's at least dozens of them out there already. Instead it would return the cats dom-lemmy, with the option to either drill down to a specific instance, or to merge all sub-lemmys called cats into a single view

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This is definitely something being discussed: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

I personally don't really stress over finding the different communities. I just subscribe to the ones that have a critical mass of users or - if there isn't a community with a lot of users - I just subscribe to the one local to me. If there isn't one local to me, I just randomly pick one.

Same here. I think people put undue meaning on the idea of having one single canonical correct place for a topic. Classic FOMO.

the users will organically migrate to the most popular sublemmy over time & the rest will close or be ignored.

I sure hope not. It does seem to be leaning that way, but it would sort of defeat the purpose of decentralization right? I guess you can’t change the course of the river. I started a small instance with a focus on gardening, and it’s growing slowly. I wonder if smaller instances would grow more evenly if they were focused on regions/ countries/ cities or with a focus on topics? Either way it’s interesting! We’re just getting started here. Things are going to change. I wonder what we’ll say a year from now.

I have nothing to contribute to the actual conversation, I just wanted to point out the way you worded that your "gardening instance is growing slowly" was funny.

I think communities will naturally move to larger subsbutt as soon as a controversial choice is made by the mods it will split off again.

Its also important to note that all the biggest subs shouldn't be on the same instance

In the days before Reddit 'won' you used to be able to find tons of niche sites/boards cultivating smaller audiences. Beer advocate/rate beer, headfi and whatever the latest splinter was there in the audiophile community both come to mind. There's generally more division by which each might find more 'aligned' or maybe their friends are on one first.

I don't know if it's possible to predict, social dynamics are weird and this is going to be new for a giant segment of the audience.

Any grouping of communities/magazines should happen client-side only. So that people can choose what to group.

I don’t necessarily think that should be an automatic process—communities with the same name on different servers don’t necessarily mean the same thing (e.g., r/trees).

Maybe communities could set, voluntarily, some sort of tags that can be subscribed to or used for search.
With that idea, cat memes, cat owners, cat pictures, etc. could all be viewed together if they include a #cat tag, regrouping them, but without a hierarchy.

My understanding is that here on kbin, a magazine can set a list of tags and toots using that tag will show up in their microblog feed.

Which is a bit different, but cool

Something like the user tags on Steam games could work well: give the users the ability to submit and vote on tags, give the moderators/admins the ability to remove and blacklist ones they don't like, and let the community sort everything as they see fit. Searching and displaying them could then be "show me everything with the tags "cute AND (cats OR dogs)"

switch-lemmies: It is just an imageboard environment

Multi-communities would be a nice feature but I really don't like people thinking it's "the solution".

Give it a little time, one community for every topic will emerge as the de facto place to go. Same happened on Reddit.

Besides, multi-communities kinda help browsing but not posting.

You know, not EVERYTHING has to be discussed in a way that puts your interest in kink on display for the world 👀

You would have to know to search for "cat" though and that's not always clear.

For example say I'm part of a sub for the steam deck (I am), instead if figuring out what to search for to get related subs I would rather be able to see a cluster of related subs on the sidebar, automatically generated.

That way instead of trying to figure out what to search for, it just clusters based on the current sub information.

The way sports league subs magazines or whatever handle it is the greater league magazine, and then each team has their own team-specific place. It largely in effect already; you have the overarching "video games" sub and then specific games usually have their own sub for game-specific updates (here is what a vendor is selling today, build discussion, etc).

The issue with federated would be each instance is likely to have their own "parent" sub, with the specific ones probably falling to whatever instance has the established population.

It would be helpful, I think, for these "default" subs to have like a repository of sorts. Large topic subs all contribute to the same silo, and instances can pick what interactive content they get from the instances regarding comments and such. But that sorta defeats the de-federation tactics by link and article posts, but I imagine attack posts probably wouldn't fly in the vast majority of instances.

Communities with the same name on different instances aren't necessarily about the same topic.

Agreed, but I'd like to be able to at least manually group together communities that are related.

For sure, but it'd be cool to be able to bundle them as an option.

/r/superbowl comes to mind.

On that note /c/football would be very different on lemmy.freedom and lemmy.fishnchips

I like it, but I also can see some issues with it where communities grouped together may have different rules and standards for posts or comments. Even on kbin it's hard to see what instance a user or thread is coming from so keeping track of multiple rule sets across domains could be tricky.

I have suggested this to a couple of app developers. Aggregating sub forums will be a huge perk if feasible in the near future. I'd like to have all my subscriptions from different platforms with the same or similar name under one page. Or at least allow me to chose which forums aggregate within a custom category. It would make the fediverse much easier to navigate especially for those who are less technically literate.

And easier for those who are technically literate too. I know how to repair my bicycle. It doesn't mean I want to do it every time I'm trying to enjoy a bike ride.

It would be nice if I could tag communities to combine them. More for consumption, as posting would have to go to a specific instance.

At first I thought this was a good idea, but now I'm not sure. Instead of encouraging the need for that sort of manual work to group every similar community for every topic, I think we should let the communities naturally converge on the winning community.

Why does there need to be one community to rule them all? A thousand communities on a topic with a thousand users each is much better for usability than 1 community with 1 million users. More people get to actually engage with others, be seen, and be heard in smaller communities.

Mega-communities are just white noise machines.

Because if I subscribe to all of them, sometimes I will see 100 identical posts of the relevant news. And if I subscribe to just one, then I'm missing out on a lot of content.

You're also missing out on a lot of content by not seeing the vast, vast majority of posts that never get noticed.

And you're missing all of the posts posted on Facebook groups!

And all of the posts posted to Hacker News!

And all of the posts on...

Okay, but I see no reason to intentionally make that issue worse.

And I see no reason to turn spaces that can be used for meaningful activity into ones that can't be.

I'm not saying those spaces can't be used. Ideally each instance would end up with its own set of popular communities that have become the one true community. But it's a much better user experience if every instance doesn't have all of the communities from every other instance duplicated.

It would be more resilient if it is distributed too, if 1 of 100 instances was temporarily offline the Mega-Magazine (or whatever you want to call it) would still function with 99% of the content.

@crwcomposer

@KittyCat

There is an issue around this on the lemmy GitHub. One ide I liked from that discussion was allowing community mods to subscribe to other communites via tags.

Like that way all the star trek communities that have the same tag could share content, and it would not depend on matching the community names in some automated way.