The idea that I'm talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I'd like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don't also follow them independently.
This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.
The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn't achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.
That's a hyperlink. Some new www-stuff which was recently developed in one of our planet's greates research Institutes which also has a great particle collider.
A better proposal in my eyes would be a "improved cross-post". Currently crossposts are just posts that link to the other post, thus making two separate conversations and double the spam for people.
My proposal would be for a crosspost to act like a true link to the original, where people wouldn't see them as two independent psots but the cross posting would just expand the amount of people that sees the original. Users that click on the cross posted post are directed to the instance it was originally posted, and the conversations are kept simple.
I guess that to implement this we would need to change how a post appears to people, it would in a way look like a post from community A that shows in community B, but the ID of the post is the same so it shows up once in feeds. Dunno.
To be fair onehundrednintysix exists because the 196 mods are a bunch of shitlibs, also 19864 exists because tbh I thought it was funny and I still do (also its more left wing)
So if I'm right about this....
Also 19864 was originally a subreddit that I used to be very active in and I just wanted it here (the rest is accurate)
!moretankie196@lemmygrad.ml - the only one I’d ever even consider posting to
Considering none of them post the same memes this is fine
You might even say... "Let one hundred and ninety-six flowers bloom!"
196 mods are a bunch of shitlibs
I'm literally a trans socialist, and 100% of the other mods are either gay or trans. We're as left as left gets.
I'll say it as many times as I have to: The move had nothing to do with politics. There's a lot of value in Ada's style of moderation, because cishet people have damn near the whole internet to serve as their "safe space" for the lack of a better term, so the value of having a dedicated queer instance is enormous. Her work means that communities like !queer_defense_front@lemmy.blahaj.zone already have the vast majority of the work done for them.
By and large, we are in agreement with Ada and her mod actions. (We don't tolerate transphobes, racists, etc., and that didn't change after the move). Where we disagree is things like Kolanaki getting banned for saying he wants to learn to be an ally but can't ask about trans topics without getting negative replies. In a community like QDF it would make sense to remove the comment because it's not the time or place for his input, but on 196 we feel like it'd be a lot more productive to teach him what he can do better to engage with us more effectively, rather than assume he's incapable of doing so. He's never said anything transphobic in either of the 196s I mod for, and I see no reason he shouldn't be welcomed in the community.
And it's worth noting that !196@lemmy.world is still free of transphobes/racists/tankies/etc., despite the panic.
Nah you ain't left as left gets. You post on a community that uses "tankie" in the same way conservatives use "woke." If that ain't the most liberal shit ever, then I am Hillary Clinton.
Ctrl+F "tankie" and replace it with "authoritarianism apologist", then. 🤷♀️ I can't say your opinion means much to me if it boils down to a semantic argument.
Authoritarianism is antithetical to everything the left stands for, at least in America (especially under Trump's reign). Being a communist isn't enough for you to claim to be on my side.
Moving to a shitlib instance is a sign of a mod team that does not care about its community, in addition yall talk about "tankies" yet you think you own your community (you do not, no mods do)
Point to one instance of me saying this. You're making shit up.
Ahem...
Yeah let's just centralize all of this bullshit.
/s
One main community greater than others with the same topic on a decetralized platform ≠ centralization.
To be fair, it is one form of centralization; although, I admit, I was twisting the meaning of the term a bit to fit my sarcastic remark.
That being said, as primarily a shitposting lurker who only occasionally actually creates content designed for sharing, I don't mind the extra communities. I'm no stranger to seeing reposts, and I get my kicks from leaving the odd comment that may or may not spawn some sort of rant (usually from myself, not the other parties), but hopefully just tickles someone, and then scrolling to the next. If it's the same thing, I just keep scrollin'.
I could see how it would be irritating to post to multiple communities designed around the same idea, but perhaps the solution is more like turning each community into an aggregate of all similar communities. You could opt your community into a master community, and any post made in one would get shared to all of them.
I mean I would still like to get rid of the same meme being posted 5 times in 2h...
Ye
Yeah we eventually got to that in the other comments. It was a whole thing
isn't the point of the fediverse to not consolidate?
I created an instance for one specific community so that users won't be affected by who federates from who (unless you're a spam instance or something like that)
There're some different ideas in the thread now, basically a fediverse type of consolidation.
Just chiming in to throw some light hearted shade at lemmy.world for defederating from the piracy communities. My time on lemmy.world was really poor, and I came away not thinking too highly of Lemmy as a whole. My experience in different instances has been a world of difference, and I finally get fantastic content in my feeds and am fully on board with Lemmy
Which instance are you using? I've been using world since start, but open to others. Never really looked into it too much.
I'm on lemm.ee! It seems to have a good balance of users and sensible defederation. On mobile, the app you use make a world of a difference too. Both Jerboa and Thunder (Android) were mid tier experiences, but now I'm using Boost and it's phenomenal!
Loads of instances do not federate with hexbear.
Surely it's only a good instance if you're happy with a much less federated experience, to say nothing of the usual complaints people have of hexbear users.
That's not what I was implying, historically "Communist" has been used for Marxists. Anarcho-Communism is only one type of Anarchist, there are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Primitivists, etc, meanwhile Marxism is always Communist.
Anarchists and Marxists do want different end-results, Anarchists want full decentralization and Marxists want full centralization and democratization, but are aligned in opposition to Capitalism and Imperialism and wish to create a more just and equitable society for all.
Again something the mods have to talk about. It’s something the mods have to discuss about (the community can take part in that discussion too, democracy and stuff). We could for example merge to lemmy.ml.

I'm scared
Oh look holocaust trivialization
Ok, that needs a little explaination
Painting Communists and fascists as equal evils originated as a form of Holocaust trivialization called "Double Genocide Theory." The goal was to make the Nazis seem not as bad by painting the Soviets as just another evil, regardless of material reality. The reality is that Communists have historically been an overall quite positive force compared to liberalism and fascism. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds to see an honest comparison and critique that highlights just how wrong equating fascism with Communism is.
Cowbee already answered your question but I'd like to point out that as a German you really need to be careful about what propaganda you believe about the Soviet Union and Stalin. Keep in mind that Germans killed 26 million soviet citizens less than a hundred years ago.
I'd take the Marxists over the literal Nazis 10000 times out of 10000, and not a single time would there even be a microsecond of contemplation. One only need to know that the Nazis industrialized mass murder and the Communists focused on improving the lives of the working class to know that it isn't even worth comparing.
I think it would be cool if something like "meta-communities" existed. Fully adjustable, fully optional. Less duplicates.
You'd sub to one meta c/memes or c/news and see a combined feed of all known instance's versions. Post to whichever you want, show up in the meta (if you want).
If you still want to block from the meta sub or individually sub to c/memes on ABC instance, you could do that. Moderation would be subject to the instance the user posted on, subject to broader instance admin's defederations and stuff.
Idk just a quick idea. Decentralization is good, but a little bit of... aggregation like this could go a long way without actually centralizing power. Could help communities (big and small niche) to grow.
I've been saying this over a year ago:
https://lemmy.world/comment/708523
This why lemmy and federation instances are so missing and empty. We don't even have the option to make custom subscription lists or I'd have manually done that. It's so badly needed
So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.
You have five communities covering the same topic. There's, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They're all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.
What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?
They treat it as if they're all one community. As if they're all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they're met with the consequences of this).
Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community's posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that's easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they're interchangeable, but as if they're all one.
This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.
We don't need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.
This is a fantastic idea. I really love the decentralization of Lemmy, but I do feel the side effects of having many copies of the same subject on different instances.
And to your point, I'd love for niche communities to have a larger audience. I need somewhere to post and read about project zomboid.
Isn't RSS what you're describing?
Sounds like a whole app idea.
It didn’t used to be like this. Maybe take it up with the brave patriot who’s made it his sacred duty to repost ml memes to world, in the hopes of convincing the world admins to defederate from ml. https://lemmy.world/comment/15251475
critical support to that lone soldier, I hope he succeeds in his mission, I would love to never see another .world post
There should be a way to see the content from different communities with the same name but from different instances in the same page, like some sort of automatic multireddit. The content would probably be limited to instances federated with your home instance but even then it's something I would like to have.
You cannot assume that communities with the same name are meant to be on the same topic.
Say I set up an instance focused on discussing parties at home. There are fun in-person games you can play with your friends when many of you are over, so I would create a community c/games for discussing them. Now, what if I want my instance to federate with lemmy.world? They already have a c/games that is dedicated to videogames. Maybe I also would need a community dedicated to videogames, but I'd have to call it c/videogames, because I already have a c/games.
Some human intervention would be required to let the network know that the local c/videogames is the one that has to federate with lemmy.world's c/games, and not the local c/games.
Maybe an automatic suggestion would be fine as a starting point, but it would be more useful that communities themselves could explicitly establish which remote communities they are associated with, without depending on the names.
That's actually a pretty idea. I'm imaging something like a tool included into lemmy where you can collect different subs into one folder and even share these/export those folders as xml or json to a new account... And now we're talking about RSS-feeds. Basically.
But RSS-feeds included into lemmy. I don't really know if that would help to get rid of reposts, but it's certainly an interesting idea. Something one would have to integrate in an Lemmy update, so you would need to contribute to the Lemmy code.
I actually love this idea. I'm on a federated service, why do I need to go to 3 meme communities on 3 instances when I could go to "meme" and see all of them?
Crossposts from within the cross-feed could be automatically hidden to avoid showing the same post multiple times, and then we just start spreading the word to crosspost instead of reposting. I think the only issue is that this would definitely be better to implement client-side because AP is just a protocol to move data, whereas this requires checking too many user-defined variables to make it idiomatic easily. I could be wrong though, I don't know the AP code very well
Thanks for this detailed reasoning.
ok
Yes, but on which instance? Lemmy.ml is not controversy free and Lemmy.world already hosts like 50% of Lemmy alone. I think the only viable option that everyone could agree on would be another instance, but that would just leave us with 3 communities.
I think the only viable option that everyone could agree on would be another instance, but that would just leave us with 3 communities.
Relevant XKCD:

An entire meme instance with no users attatched to it with multiple specific meme communities
I created dullsters.net just for just one community, it could be more if there were demand for dull content or another dull community wanted to come over, but I don't have any plans to make it some big thing.
It's still federated.
They are just trying to say that you don't want all your eggs in one basket. In my opinion it's better to have it posted once on either and it shows up in my list. The logic is that if everyone posts on 1 instance, that instance ends up having more power over other instances. For instance it can defederate with another instance and since all the content is on theirs those users would be forced to start over, or join the bigger instance and abide by their rules. Slowly you end up back in a situation like reddit. Where maybe they put ads in, and you have to choose ads and active number of users, or no ads and very little content starting fresh. Spreading out content helps combat enshitification if you will.
Nah. The Lemmy.world mods will ban you for posting or commenting anything that isn’t in line with western propaganda. Fuck merging.
Your proposal is much too streamlined.
Perhaps you presume memes are a commodity of which consumption should be maximized!
Nay, I say. Memes are an essential nutrient that becomes toxic in larger doses.
Thus, they must be scattered about in the environment to be encountered by happenstance whilst I pursue my main information foraging goal of finding ad hoc justification for my durable sense of dread.
Memes, uhh, find a way.
Do whatever you want but I am planning many epic shitposts pretty much anywhere I can get a reaction.
Ok.
How about rebasing instead of merging to get a more linear meme history?

I think it's healthy for the fediverse to have similar communities on different instances, because if we centralize, it basically becomes reddit, which means moderation and censorship are at the whims of whoever owns the only place people go.
I'd also like to give a shout-out to sopuli.xyz/c/memes for having a popular memes community too.
I think it’s healthy for the fediverse to have similar communities on different instances, because if we centralize, it basically becomes reddit, which means moderation and censorship are at the whims of whoever owns the only place people go.
See also this blog post discussing this issue and some of the proposed improvements: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/...
I like their proposed solution #3, but it is somewhat hampered by the DNS-centric model of ActivityPub. I hope that one day something like this proof-of-concept of making AP content-addresable (which i found via this post about "How decentralized is Bluesky really?") will be widely adopted and make instances less important.
But even without such a major change as moving to content addressability, that blog's proposed solution #3 (simply letting communities "follow" other communities) would let readers pick which moderation they like without posters needing to manually cross post to reach everyone: If communities A and B could mutually follow eachother, posts would by default appear on both but could be independently removed from either. 🤔
That sounds like a pretty cool solution. I don't have a good mental picture for how that would work on the technical side, but anything that does behind-the-scenes work like that for new users is probably worth considering.
The issue is that lemmy.world is having federation issues bc they didn't update to last release
I think they are about to.
It would be tight if there was a local option(What we have now) and a All option that let's you see all the communities across all federated spaces that share that same name.
Sure, but how do we react when people don't follow this and cross post anyway? Which one do we downvote?
Always two there are. And they're both full of reposts.
The chronically online weirdos on world don't like the chronically online weirdos on ml. They are both chronically online weirdos and I try to view these really active communities or names I recognize like a zoo. These people are throwing shit at eachother for our amusement. Keep it separate.
Also, one of Lemmy’s biggest benefits is the lack of centralization. Reddit’s biggest flaw is that every subreddit is hosted by the same site. That means every single subreddit is ultimately under the control of just a few admins. Federation tries to change that, by allowing virtually anyone to be an admin. If you don’t like a particular instance’s admins, you can change instances or spin up your own.
Consolidating communities totally defeats the purpose of federation. If things are consolidated on a specific instance and you don’t like that instance’s admins, you can’t just change instances. You’re locked into the instance, the same way redditors are locked into using Reddit.
Really great point, I'd be stoked for these communities to drift further from eachother. That's just more content for us.
We're all trapped in the zoo, my friend. The illusion is that none of us are caged.
@lemmy.ml
go to feed...
@lemmy.ml
go to feed...
There was some proposal that I have seen multiple times on Lemmy and at least once on the GitHub repo that communities should be able to subscribe to each other much like users can subscribe to communities. I vastly prefer this to other proposals such as auto-merging communities with the same name, which I can think of a few ways that can go wrong.
It would also be reasonably intuitive for the average user, since following stuff is already a familiar action you take on social media. You wouldn't really need to understand the quirks of federation to know why posting to one community makes it appear on other downstream communities. And as far as I know about ActivityPub (which is admittedly not much), it's not a stretch use it to implement a feature like this.
I wonder if this proposal ever reached anywhere.
save