Fediverse

I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.

I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.

About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.

Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that's fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that's okay.

As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a 'problem'? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.

It's not a problem. It's a great feature. Because there's more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you're free to do so. But I'm also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.

It's always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they're brainless and they just think of Lemmy as "the new Reddit" (or Mastodon as "the new Twitter").

I personally don't think this is a huge issue, but it is an issue. I usually pick the biggest community on a topic, or if there are multiple that are fairly active, subscribe to both/all. The only real complaint I have about it is that users will often make the same post to both communities, so I see duplicate posts on my timeline and the discussion is split in half.

I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances, in a way that they would appear as a single community to users. I don't know how that would be implemented though.

I've already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it's good that the badness of that "solution" is acknowledged.

As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that's what webrings are for! Let's bring them back from the '90s. Basically get's give the power of "static search" back to the users.

Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I'm wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I'm mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.

The real problem is how do we centralize all communities. I mean, there's a Linux community on lemmy.world, but also Linux Web sites, forums, chat rooms, people on Twitter that post about Linux. Sometimes people talk about Linux in emails, or text messages. They're probably having in person conversations about Linux. This fragmentation is ruining things.

No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.