Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

  • people having to subscribe to both to see the content
  • posters having to crosspost to both
  • comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

  • ydieb@lemm.ee
    44·
    1 year ago

    A cool feature would be an opt in community federation. So two aligned communities on different instances can “friend” each other and will be synonymous. If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.

    • Natanael@slrpnk.net
      11·
      1 year ago

      This would require content addressing to be robust. It’s what bluesky’s atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).

      https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol

      A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.