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Why can't magazines/communities aggregate content from other instances? (kbin.social)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/fediverse@kbin.social
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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?

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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (9 children)

Because they're two different communities/magazines hosted in two different servers from two different platforms

Federation makes it posible for you to participate in both

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    I understand they are two different communities, I was just hoping it was a bug with Lemmy and kbin not talking to each other properly. The reason Reddit/Facebook/et al are so huge is because people want to have a single community to talk with, not 15 little communities all having their own discussions. I get the appeal of that, but if I wanted to join a small forum I'd go to startrekforum.com or something like that. We already have sites that offer small communities; what we needed was a replacement for Reddit. For the moment, it appears that Reddit is still the best way to be part of a large community, and that's sad for people like me that just want a large community without having to rely on one website to host that community. Oh well.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    We already have sites that offer small communities; what we needed was a replacement for Reddit.

    The thing is neither Lemmy not kbin were made to be Reddit replacements.

    The reason Reddit/Facebook/et al are so huge is because people want to have a single community to talk with

    They're also centralised and their respective servers can tolerate much more content being shared/posted onto them than a fediverse server can. Having different communities allows for a given server not to be saturated.

    Idk why there are so many general use instances when the threadiverse would be a great place for themed instances to exist. But even with thematic instances you can't avoid similar communities existing (because multiples servers could exist for the same topic/fandom/etc.

    Something that connects communities about the same topic from different servers into a "macro-community", so everything posted in any of the communities can be read when you click one of them, without putting to much pressure into a sole server, would be cool. But I don't think is posible with AP alone.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Idk why there are so many general use instances when the threadiverse would be a great place for themed instances to exist.

    I would suspect that it's because when these instances were coming online a week or two back there weren't any other instances around, so having them be general-purpose was good. The Threadiverse can't "afford" special-purpose instances until there's already a large number of people around.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    It also could be that people want their instance to be the instance for that community, or they want to be in control of the community, not someone else. It's also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation (having a @timbervale, a @timbervale, and a @timbervale could lead to a whole bunch of confusion).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    It doesn't matter if an instance wants their instance to be "the" instance for a community, they don't get to decide that for the whole Fediverse. It's up to the users.

    It's also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation

    Usernames should be interpreted in the same context as email address. I am FaceDeer@kbin.social, the "@kbin.social" part is as much a part of my username as the "FaceDeer" part.

    The UI should probably be displaying it more prominently than it is, that's a bug that Kbin should resolve at some point.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    You're right, but the current tradition and momentum are towards using short display names; virtually every service that has a public-facing feature uses display names (even most email clients put the first and last name of the users instead of their actual email addresses).

    We definitely should be using the full bit on kbin/lemmy, though, as it's so critical to the idea of the Fediverse, you're 100% correct on that.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    The current tradition may simply have to change when it comes to the Fediverse, because the Fediverse doesn't work that way. It can't work that way because instances are independent of each other. There's no central authority that can decide which one gets to have the "startrek" community name or the "FaceDeer" username.

    If you want there to be a central authority to decide that stuff, then you don't want the Fediverse.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I want to narrow down the topics I'm looking for without needing to search and subscribe to each instance. So instead of going from All to Subscribed, which have a lot of non-startrek content, I want to view all of the startrek subs across all federated instances even if I haven't subscribed.

    This sounds like what the OP is asking about, although I would actually love to just pick some strings of text and save it as a subgroup. If I don't like one or two of them I can remove them from the list, but while browsing my startrek subgroup I get to see content from newly created startrek magazines without needing to regularly search and add them manually.

    That would result in seeing content across instances at the same type for the same topic without needing to keep up with new instances. And to be honest, I don't care about instance specific rules. I just want to browse and interact in a respectful way and if some instance has silly rules they can let me know I broke a silly rule and I'll bow out of theirs.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago*

    Kind of, but not exactly. I'm asking for a solution where kbin.social and lemmy.world and startrek.website all post to the exact same community, but in a way that doesn't require me to be subject to the whims of the mods of any specific instance.

    If a mod on !startrek@startrek.website (currently the largest Star Trek community instance) were to go on a power trip and ban anybody who mentioned Star Trek: Discovery, I wouldn't want to be part of that community, anymore. Most people wouldn't care, though, and just wouldn't post about Star Trek: Discovery. So, fine, I go subscribe to another instance where they allow Star Trek: Discovery, but if !startrek@startrek.website has 20 million subscribers, and the next biggest instance only has 40 thousand, the experience of using that next biggest instance is going to suck in comparison. That's the problem I'm trying to find a solution to: a situation whereby a specific instance doesn't control the content for everybody, but instead they only control the content for their specific instance.

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