Most of the communities are on one instance i.e .ml. Should we spin up more instances and start spreading communities either by location, interests, etc? Maybe, I am wrong but do mod/s who run the communities understand the idea of “decentralized social networks” or this is just to get few brownie points to start the community and increase the traffic? Please correct me if I am wrong.

No offence, just an observation.

  • zksmk@lemmy.ml
    12·
    3 years ago

    There are benefits to each community being local and server specific (moderation, culture, community), but there are also benefits to the idea of a single community being spread over multiple instances (decentralisation, resilience, activity/reach). There are reasons why few people want to start a or post content to a community on a random server, and most people opt for the biggest one. There’s relatively few people as it is already and creating duplicates, fragmentation and inevitable manual content replication doesn’t seem like the way to go about things.

    This is why I like the idea of a potential future feature where on top of /c/acommunity we would also get a /t/atopic that aggregates all the communities with the same name from all the instances into one place/feed. This would NEED to be optional and the community mods would have to have an optin/optout feature for their community being included in the /t/topic feed. I think that would make both sides happy.

    As it is, I don’t see having active communities on other instances likely, unfortunately. Individual accounts can work just fine from other instances, and the content gets auto replicated, but the parent hub is still in one place.

      • nutomic@lemmy.ml
        6·
        3 years ago

        You mean that a single community would be hosted on multiple instances? Its a nice idea, but I think its impossible to do in Activitypub. Would like to be proven wrong though.

        • tmpod@lemmy.ptM
          3·
          3 years ago

          Yeah, I believe that’s what they meant. It would be neat, but don’t know AP to be able to comment on that.

        • zksmk@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 years ago

          I might be wrong, and correct me if I am, because I don’t really know how AP works, but I feel like this functionality already exists, sort of. Mostly because the suggestion wasn’t really a cross instance community, with everything that it entails (subs, mods, bans, etc…) but more like a custom filtered feed.

          If you currently go to the All page you see different posts from different communities from different instances. If this was filtered by community name (minus instance) it would effectively be the suggestion. Just have this filter functionality accessible through instance.tld/t/insertfiltertopichere

          One key point though: as I understand it, for posts from any remote community to appear on the All page at least one home user needs to subbed to the community, it’s not enough for at least one user to be subbed to any other community on the remote instance? In that case, for this idea to be effective, at least one user each needs to be manually subbed to all the individual same named communities, or I feel like there could be a home bot user that subs to all the communities on the white listed instances.

          I hope I’m explaining this well. Would this work? Sounds hacky, but looks to me like it would work.

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
            5·
            3 years ago

            Something like a multireddit? That should work, and it probably wouldnt require any federation changes. You can open an issue for it.

    • starfish@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      3 years ago

      You mean, if both a and b communities agreed ie both have these feature enabled they can share a topic/s among them?