I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.

A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?

B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    It doesn’t prevent duplication, but:

    Matrix has this concept called “spaces” in which you can put chat rooms, that can also be nested. In a way, a Lemmy community is not unlike a Matrix space, where every thread is a chat room.

    The neat thing is that you can create a space that contains spaces and chat rooms of your choice and either share it with others or keep it to yourself. For example, some open source project use spaces you can join to allow Slack/Discord like messaging (and not just a chatroom) but I personally use private spaces to group my bridged chats.

    This doesn’t solve the duplication problem, of course. For that, you can use websites like https://browse.feddit.de/. Maybe some (alternative) frontend/app can integrate with that to suggest finding communities rather than creating duplicates.

    However, duplicates are important. Not just in case instances go down and disappear, but also because not every server federates with every other server. You can’t centralize the system on a single community and tell everyone on a big server “sorry, you guys have all been blocked, no more talking about topic for you”.

    Some duplicates are fine, and grouping them rather than artificially uniting them seems like the best solution to me.