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?
That’s right. !Gaming@lemmy.ml is different from !Gaming@beehaw.org
Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn’t really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
well that’s confusing
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.
I feel like Lemmy/Kbin should indicate the host along with the community name. (i.e. @gaming@lemmy.ml)
They do, given it’s not on your instance. See the attached screenshot, the host website is in the same format you mentioned:
not in kbin, you have to mouse over the name to see the host
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.
If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
One of my favorite features of Lemmy. Makes taking over and astroturfing communities more costly.
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
There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.
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The only “universal community search” tool that we know of so far, is https://browse.feddit.de/ .
But I’d be very open to adding this type of functionality into lemmy’s apps, and this UI too.
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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 👍
You can follow both, that’s the federation.
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 pointYep. 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.
good idea
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.
That would be cool
Why does “better” always mean “more complicated” on the Fediverse?
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.
Sometimes the best thing isn’t the easiest thing
Unfortunately that breaks the concept of federation. I expected servers with good relationships with each other to replicate posts, otherwise what’s the point of federation?
The point of federation (on Lemmy) was to allow the different websites to talk to each other. So your lemmy.ml account can talk to most other websites that run lemmy software. This means create posts on external communities, comments, and be able to follow such communities. For now, the choice was made to keep communities local and not locally federated.
It sounds more like identity federation. I think it’s going to be very confusing for a lot of people.
Makes sense, thank you!
How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?
O wait, the whole federation allows federation of just users and not communities?
So all this time I have been looking at posts just on the main instance and not posts across all instances?
fugggggggg so now I have to go search for communities of same name on all other instances as well and subscribe to them? ok, fine. How do I do this? there should really be something that automates this processNo, 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.
you don’t have to, you can just sub the major ones
Something I noticed. If you visit “All”, it contains posts from multiple servers, so that can help with discovery.
they are federated in the sense that they’re an email-like entity. it’s just they’re not all merged together I suppose.
It’s not a big deal, as the posts to these communities and thus the communities should be in your ALL tab anyways. As long as someone on your server already follows them.
It’s a loose federation of communities. Each server has its own communities that are pushed out. Meaning you can end up with 20 different gaming communities as each one will list the server they’re part of. It’s not like usenet where the newsgroup name is the same regardless of what server you’re on.
You can have multis, and you can subscribe to multiples at once.
I have about twenty different gaming subs on all different servers subscribed, so I’ll see any one of them in my feed.
Does it matter which one posted what I’m looking at?
Not really.
So, the way that I figured it, you could have the !something@someserver concept, which I call groups (lemmy calls them communities), and the collision of those (say, !something with no server), would be called “regions” because they’d be several competing communities trying to use a shared resource. Moderation of a region would be a nightmare.
You could probably make a reddit-esque “multireddit” style view that represents the “regions” concept - just know that you are posting to a particular community with particular mods, in the end.
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