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?
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?
No, communities are the main federated item in lemmy.
For example, !calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone is also viewable from here: https://lemmy.ml/c/calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I would argue that “viewable from” is a far cry from truly federated. The fact that I have to subscribe to infinitely many individual communities to see all, say, “Technology” content across all of lemmy seems like a near-fatal flaw to me.
The same problem existed on reddit, and it will resolve in the same way. There are often overlapping communities, but ultimately, the users will decide what works, and one or two of them will win out.
What’s the point of federation then?
There’s not just one server or one entity that controls everything. If one server shuts down it doesn’t shut down the entire service. And even though having multiple communities on multiple servers named the same might not be ideal, it’s also a feature. If you really don’t like the mods of one community on one server, you can join a similar community on a different server. You can think of the servers like cities. Every city has a game store, and this way you can access all the game stores at once. You might have a favorite community on a favorite server and that might be where you create your new posts, but you can still read and participate in the discussions going on in similar communities on all the different servers.
People should really see naming conflicts, not as a negative, but a positive.
If you have two cities that run their own lemmy servers, say Wales and Wellington, they can each have their own
!newscommunity, like:wales.lemmy.com/c/newswellington.lemmy.com/c/newsThis is a good way of framing the concept.
Great analogy. One of the great things about the internet of old though, was that you automatically got exposed to all of the ideas out there, not just the ones in your city. :)
That’s possible with Lemmy too. Just make sure you select the “All” filter when browsing instead of just the “Local” filter and it should show you all the federated posts.
I think the point is more that the federation is visible and confusing to your average end user.
It avoids centralisation. You can simply defederate from nazi instances, and the whole platform can’t be sold out from underneath you.
And for someone like me, who is trans and runs several instances for the gender diverse community, I’m able to curate the experience so my users don’t experience constant hate and aggression. So if someone is posting transphobic stuff that doesn’t get actioned on their home instance, I can block that user (or their whole instance) from mine even if I’m not a moderator of the community.
That or what happens is that everyone goes with their local server’s version and the federation isn’t as heavily user. At present on lemmy.ml, you’re presented with Local by default and you have to actively switch to All to go outside the server. It seems a bit as if they’re selling the idea of federation while also not promoting the idea of federation once you’re logged in by having ‘All’ be the default view.
Hmm yea I don’t like it much either, however, I remember /r/technology got progressively worse and the alternative was just a shittier subreddit with a slightly different name.
Unison would be nice, but it’s not so different from reddit come to think of it
I’m not sure anything is different here in that respect. I’m still learning my way around, but are communities not still autocratic fiefdoms controlled entirely by some combination of the server admins and moderators? It will just be a shittier community with the same name.
Hmm true that is a concern
I’m just speculating here, but I remember way back when reddit was just a bunch of shitty html css and blue links. People would joke it would weed some times of people out
Maybe the complicated nature of federated web apps will drive away a similar crowd
That’s actually a really good point. There’s an optimum number of users that’s obviously orders of magnitude higher than where Lemmy is at right now, but it’s probably an order of magnitude lower than reddit’s current position. If reddit’s changes could drive the most technologically literate 10-20% of reddit’s user base over here, that might be a very good thing indeed.
Well, one would be named
!Community@domain.com
And the other
!Community@website.com
you don’t have to, you can just sub the major ones
Do instances “subscribe” to get the communities of other instances? Or how does it work the “all” filter?
Instances don’t subscribe. People follow federated communities. So you can type !gaming@beehaw.org into the search bar here, and subscribe to it.
Yeah, I understand that, it’s why I used subscribe in quotes since I didn’t know to phrase it better.
My question is, how an instance knows about the communities of other instances so they appear when changing from “local” to “all”?
Is it only until a user searches for them in that instance? Before that both instances are unknown to each other?
Or is there a config so one instance tries to always be updated of other instances?
Federation is based on a push methodology, that happens after a subscribe. The flow is that I subscribe to a federated community, and that community’s server now knows my activitypub id, and can push community posts and comments to my servers inbox. The connection happens after that first subscribe.