When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It’s the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue with Lemmy/kbin not talking nicely, or is this how the Fediverse is?
Is it (at least theoretically) possible for me to post an article on https://kbin.social/m/startrek and have it automatically show up on https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek, or are they always going to be two separate communities?
You’re probably wanting something like Reddit’s “multireddit” functionality. I know of this issue for Lemmy, with some links to related issues in the comments. Kbin has one here.
Unfortunately, not. Multi-reddit just lumped everything together, which allows for duplicates. Using my Star Trek analogy: if there was a new episode, and both communities had a thread for discussion, I’d have to go into both threads to talk about the latest episode. What I want is a single thread being posted to one community automatically gets pulled into the other, and comments can be posted on either site but appear on both. That’s the way federation should work, but it doesn’t currently work like that. That’s my frustration. If I wanted to go to multiple communities to have the same conversation multiple times, I’d search for web forums that have existed ever since “Web 2.0” was a thing in the early 2000’s. There’s a reason people tend not to use those small forums anymore, and favor larger sites like Reddit. Hopefully it’s a change that can come to the Fediverse sooner rather than later.
I would dispute that, actually. Sometimes people make separate communities because they want there to be separate communities. Over on Reddit that required you to make communities with different names, but here you can also do it by going to different instances. Maybe there’s a [email protected] that’s all about how awesome the Romulans are, and [email protected] wants nothing to do with them.
If that’s the case then your “problem” will be self-correcting, if there are multiple threads on the same subject in different communities people will tend to contribute to the larger one and it’ll snowball at the expense of the others.
Some people might prefer the smaller communities and threads, though, and thanks to federation they can pick whichever one they want.
It sounds more like you want a cross posting feature. There is no reliable programmatic way to determine both threads are about the new show, and anything that’s not reliable and programmatic is just ripe for abuse.
A cross posting feature would be nice, but for something like “the new episode just dropped” without some serious coordination between the communities, you would still end up with a lot of threads.
Basically I want a mailing list feature, but one that mimics Reddit’s UI. We already do this with websites (there are registrars and DNS servers that aren’t controlled by any one organization), so why can’t we do it with content? Share content with every instance as it’s posted, as referenced by a “DNS server”-like setup, and bam, done. Each instance can moderate the content how they see fit, and if one instance decides to be dicks about it, users can switch to a different instance and have literally the exact same community and the exact same content as they had before the previous instance owners became dicks.