I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?

    • JackFromWisconsinA
      161·
      2 years ago

      It is different for sure.

      The “lemmy-verse” is really just a bunch of separate websites all running the same software that talks to each other. It’s like email, where you can send an email from a Gmail account, and receive it on an outlook account. The same concept being applied to social media now.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      174·
      2 years ago

      Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.

      • testman@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 years ago

        wait, what about if you have two communities where mods and admins are fine. Are there any options to federate those communities?

        all this time I was under impression that communities already federate

          • testman@lemmy.mlEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            Is it?
            On Mastodon I can take a look at “Federated timeline” and see the posts from the people that I have not followed. Because instances already federate by themselves (due to some other user on my instance following the user on other instance) but yes, I see your point

            • iod@lemmy.mlEnglish
              15·
              2 years ago

              Yep. Would be cool if we could subscribe to tags or topics so to speak. The 2 related gaming communities could then be grouped together in a federated view for the topic “Gaming”. At least for reading comments, not sure how posting would work.

              • spinoza_the_jedi@lemmy.mlEnglish
                3·
                2 years ago

                You know, I actually really like the idea of tags. I don’t currently have an issue with manually subscribing to similar communities on different servers (I’m often just browsing “all” to see all communities and all servers). But being able to subscribe to a tag would be cool. Then I could more easily identify and opt out of the communities I don’t like that match those tags.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          72·
          2 years ago

          There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.

          • testman@lemmy.ml
            3·
            2 years ago

            yep, that does make sense from security / moderation standpoint, as one “god community” would probably get Bad Apple’d ™ .
            but I would argue that “lol just manually opt-in to other communities” could be improved.
            I will go search through issues on GitHub to see which of my ideas were already proposed and which still need to be opened 👍

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          51·
          2 years ago

          It’s just how the internet used to work before centralized US tech giants took over all comms platforms. Instead of one site, there are many to choose from.