Communities on different instances about the same topic should have the option to essentially federate so a post on one appears on all of them and opening any of them shows you the comments from all of them. This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post. Federation could be decided by the community mods and the comments can have a little “/c/communityname@instance.name” on it so you know which community the comment was originally posted on.
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You are literally describing reddit. Allowing mods to federate communities together would be novel.
The beauty of the fediverse is that when one volunteer-run server goes down (as happens all the time) there is little disruption if your feed is filling with other instance’s content. You can’t count on these volunteer-run servers to have 99.9% uptime like reddit, they can disappear over night.
Same idea for communities. If lemmy.world disappears tomorrow there are dozens of communities that disappear with it; fragmented across the fediverse. If mods of those communities were federated with complementary communities on other instances then there is no disruption.
I don’t think that communities should automatically federate, it should be agreed to by the mods. But with the current population we can’t afford to keep identical communities isolated. Many will die a slow death when together it could have been thriving.
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All I’m saying is that if /c/butterflies exists on multiple instances they should be able to “aggregate” themselves as if they were one instance. We don’t have enough users to isolate small communities; they have no shot here.
If large federated communities want to exclude others… those others can just form their own federated group. We’re still in a much better position than if we had one large community on a single instance or a speckling of tiny ones across the fediverse that aren’t large enough to drive engagement.
In the current model small communities are forced to choose a server. When that server goes down we lose an entire community. Two examples off the top of my head are Firefox and Android. We can’t count on legends to save us every time. And why go through that chaos when we have the underlying systems to avoid it?
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Wait, what? No, not at all. There is no reason for them to redundantly store all the data.
Imagine the same concept but the data is just being aggregated. The purpose is that content gets more exposure and engagement not to create an archive.
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Is that so different than how the fediverse currently works? Subscribed content is already being federated across instances I’m just asking it to be organized together. When your instance federates with a community on another instance it doesn’t get the entire “5-year” backlog sent to it; only new posts and old content that someone interacts with is sent.
I think there are limits to the scalability of the fediverse, in general, I just don’t see how organizing the data differently is breaking anything. Only the most limited servers are going to be impacted from receiving content from three /c/butterflies instead of one. Most people are probably subscribed to the duplicate communities already; I certainly am.
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ehhhh, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! personally i think it makes vastly more sense to federate on a per community basis rather than a per instance basis. an instance is most likely going to hold a vast array of users and topics in an ideal world, in which case the general consensus on what is and what is not considered to be relevant or desirable content for the given group is likely quite difficult-- there’s nothing to go on, as everyone’s talking about different things and holds markedly different values because of it. But communities? Perfect sense! Every community is about a very specific subject/topic, and comes with a set of rules/values for everyone who wishes to post/interact with it. Once you get to the granularity of federated communities, it no longer feels quite so high handed to federate or de-federate with something, because the general consensus of the community is assumedly much more clear.
Sure, leaving automatic federating up to the client makes sense, but the meat of it sounds like a much better level of granularity for decision-making for something that impacting than it being server-wide…
But perhaps I am simply way off mark. my experience is small, in comparison to my conviction lol.
Even thinking of it in terms of non-fediverse platforms. reddit often had multiple subreddits about the same exact topic. But the communities were different, often even splinters from each other because of disagreements on content and moderation. You end up with the original sub, Foo, followed by FooMemes, and TrueFoo, TrollFoo, FooJerk, etc.
If communities start getting merged together automatically, it’s going to end up causing problems. Most likely the culture of someplace like lemmy.ml will end up being marketedly different than some other instances (and already is). I would not want posts from a memes group there mixed with a memes group from elsewhere. Grouping the same post client side, sure. But there’s a reason for separate groups about the same topic.