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Seems like we could use federation on the community level
Yes, exactly this. Using Reddit as an anology, each Subreddit should be it's own instance, rather than having duplicate subreddits across many instances.
We would still have multiple instances/communities with the same name and intetest.
As we dkd with Subreddit, but one usually wins out as the defacto.
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I think that's more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the local neighborhoods; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities.
In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It's ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get cut off from your preferred one. You can still get out and explore the nearby neighborhoods, but they have the same Starbucks and MicroCenter that yours does. This still is useful in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI's.
The problem is people that would be willing to run and moderate a sub on reddit are not all capable or willing to host an instance for that thing.
Yeah, I mean once it became clear the the Threadiverse would be populated by tens of thousands of self-exiles from Reddit who left for a bunch of issues, relatively few of them directly related to how federation should work (i.e. people like me), it was sort of bound to happen to any general interest instance.
The Star Trek and the security instances (and even lemmygrad) are probably more how the model was envisioned. I'm not entirely sure it's "better," but it is better suited to the infrastructure that was in place.
Yeah a big part of the reason why this is happening is because the vast majority of people coming here don't give a shit about federation they just want a version of Reddit that isn't Reddit.
I guarantee if another Reddit alternative starts growing that is centralized and more aligned with how reddit was, these people will leave for it.
I was on Squabbles for a bit when the API changes were looming. It was fine, I ran into nice folks, but more than the performance or the community, I was concerned that a single centralized site, run by one dude, who seemed determined to set it up to quickly monetize, was not going to be sustainable.
I admit that federation was not why I came to Kbin, but if federated sites are where open-internet folks are sharing links and pics and discussing them, then that's where I was headed. I suppose the good thing is that anyone who is deeply invested in federation working exactly how it was originally envisioned can continue to pursue that goal with their own instances, up to the point where they consider defederation with the (relative) normies.
That's not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that's linked it. Then you'd see the link once, but could see the post from each community that's linked it rolled up underneath it.
Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect "hot links" in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.
Yeah we need something like multireddits which have collections of communities across instances that can be subscribed to instead of the individual communities themselves. So your worldnews could be a single subscription of all the worldnews communities across lemmy.world, beehaw, etc. De-duping for extra credit!