Long comment ahead, sorry about that.

This is the exact worry I’ve had about lemmy’s federation for a long long time, so I’ve even made an issue on the github awhile ago, with a possible solution. Take a look.

But I don’t think it’s been high up on the dev’s priority list, either due to lack of time and a backlog or they just don’t see it as a desired feature, because they might like the idea of a hundred separate similar communities. They might see the future of lemmy’s federation in the form of old school forums but with one account login, instead of as a single large community a la reddit. I think that’s a mistake. There’s a reason reddit replaced forums, and it’s not just a single login, it’s also single communities.

I almost think mastodon might solve this sooner than lemmy. All they need to do is take the existing feature of “trending posts”, and just apply it to individual hashtags too, which can btw already be followed, since the latest update. Boom, they basically already have interconnected “subreddits” at that point. They would just need to add top of the day/week/month, and they’ve mirrored all the features.

And to be honest, I see merit in both approaches. There is a certain level of humanity, personability and coziness in old school forums that isn’t often or easily replicated in large communities generated by the modern social media format. But the other format also has its merits.

Imagine there’s an instance dedicated to engineering. It would obviously have the best askelectronics community. And lets say you’re a person that’s into plants and has an account on an instance dedicated to gardening. And now you want to ask a question to askelectronics. You’d first have to know about the existence, the name and/or the url of the engineers’ instance and then go there to get a good answer. That seems like a hassle and unlikely to happen. Mastodon has hundreds of instances.

What would instead happen, is that people would gravitate to a couple, two or three, large instances, that would become huge, most likely split on political grounds. And that’s, to be honest, kinda what’s already happening with lemmy, no? Maybe two or three additional instances, for, continents or something special, like an instance for official communities of projects. I feel like this future would lead to max 10 large politically echo-chambered instances.

If instead we really would get random topic based instances, things would be very different from reddit. You’d always start your posts with: “So… guys… what’s the best instance to ask this question on?”

And if this feature I suggested existed, with the opt in/opt out choice for communities, you could have the best of both worlds, with ease of use included. Actual technical, bandwidth, funding, scaling issues not withstanding, I haven’t considered that yet.

Maybe I’m wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m curious what other people think.

super_bowl

superb__owl

1. Multi-communities akin to multireddits, and also, cross-instance multi-communities.

2. If you log into your account on a post, I’d prefer to be taken back to the post, instead of the front page, as it is now.

3. MoAr federation (for example, the ability to follow mastodon accounts from Lemmy.