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Is there a way to subscribe to all communities with the same name?

Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?

Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.

Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.

I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?

lod ,

I understand the intent and it’s a valid feature to want, but this just isn’t going to work. How does the app or server know all communities named “whatever” are actually about the same “whatever”? Wouldn’t bad actors just create communities with the same names as anything that became popular? And what about the massive number of duplicate posts every time a story big enough that all the communities post it?

I totally get why someone would want this, but it’s complicated

irkli ,
@irkli@lemmy.world avatar

Oooh oooh someone write an aggregator to fetch them into one thread and replies will go to the right destination.

derpysmilingcat ,

I would like to keep things as they are now and simply add a sign up button next to the instance in the search window. That way they all stay separate but it doesn’t take a lot of extra clicks to get signed up for everything. Or maybe we just have some site hosted by Lemmy devs that crawls for instances based on a keyword search that let’s you sign up from there.

mookulator OP ,

I get that. And definitely simpler. But what if a new community pops up? It sounds tedious to keep checking back in the search engine

AapoL , (edited )

Technically a notification could be if a instance using the same name pops up, but that wouldn’t be that simple. I don’t think its that tedious to check the list every once in a while.

As to the design I had an idea. It could be a list of instances using the name and at the top it has a join all button. Then instance has its own join button.

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/8803600c-3ac2-4648-a5ae-1e0bfb9b6fba.jpeg

mausy5043 ,

.oO Trying to remember how this worked on FidoNet.

irkli ,
@irkli@lemmy.world avatar

Ah… But you’re thinking of the ‘benefit’ of centralization. That one-world model gateways what you can see as much as it enables.

There’s always more your can’t see, and discovery is half the fun. The diversity of approach, content, management, rules and culture are more interesting, to me, than just quantity.

Also it’s very early in adoption of federation. Let’s see how things pan out. And we definitely need to be careful of replicating the past

Everything has Side Effects.

TempleSquare ,

It doesnt have to be centralized. Just allow power users a function in their Lemmy app of choice to “group” similar communities into one mega community per topic.

Like a frontpage, but just for ONE topic.

And then we could share lists with each other or something.

fidodo ,

You wouldn’t necessarily want this since communities are different depending on the context of the instance it may not be relevant to you. It would be great however to be able to create combos of the communities you subscribe to.

gamer ,

I think a good middle-ground would be if someone could manually create a public community group that combines multiple communities into one, and that other people can subscribe to. That way you can have manual curation and avoid issues with spam, unmoderated communities, and inconsistent names (e.g. /c/catpics vs /c/catphotos)

EDIT: after a few seconds of research, I learned this is what “multi-reddits” are, and people are already asking for it lol

mookulator OP ,

Or maybe the community owners could do it? Seems like a natural extension of federation is for communities to track their counterparts in the federated servers

mookulator OP ,

Yeah there would be plenty of circumstances where you wouldn’t, like politics or local news or something. But I have to imagine there are more circumstances where you do want it. I said this below - what if the community owners grouped themselves with their counterparts, kind of like sub-federations

bouncing ,
@bouncing@partizle.com avatar

I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).

Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.

Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.

giacomo ,
@giacomo@lemmy.world avatar

Would you want this to work retroactively also? Like if I spun up an instance with a community called astronomy with only pictures of buttholes that look like galaxies, should that be automatically added to the community group? What if I started the most legit instance with a community called astronomy with a bunch of my university of space scientist buddies, would that also be retroactively added to the community group?

I think it’s a cool idea to be able to subscribe to all communities of a similar name. But it’s kind of akin to following a hashtag eventually as the fediverse grows.

It would be pretty cool if communities could federate, but that would be p much like a content load balancer. Like if 5 different instances all had an astronomy community that was sync’d across all 5 instances. You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community. Like raid for social media lol.

Hazama ,

Okay. That’s a good point. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. (I’m basically just getting into Lemmy myself here) but yeah, there’s room for some bad actors there lol.

I guess the real solution is like you said, let communities say, “hey, we think they’re cool and want to share content with them”

f4te ,

I like the RAID idea, there are two F1 communities on different servers with the same number of subs. they should be synced. no reason to have two

DharkStare ,

You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community.

I’ve thought about something like that as well. I think it would be a pretty convenient feature.

Losername ,

I want this as well. For example, I am a teacher and want to find teacher related discussions. I really don’t care which instance it is on. Just gimme the teacher drama and organization.

Do I need to make several accounts to subscribe to them all? I’m kinda technology impaired and don’t understand internet stuff easy.

derpysmilingcat ,

Unless it is on an instance that has federated from the one you’re on, like Lemmy.world and Beehaw, you only need the one account. .

Zardoz ,

/r/asstronomy here I come

andy_wijaya_med ,
@andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world avatar

Damn that’s a good one. Here take my upvote.

mvirts ,

Add a distributed hash table layer for fetching content in a topic on demand? RSS+BitTorrent = hashtags for Lemmy?

Existential_prices ,
@Existential_prices@lemmy.world avatar

Tell me more about your buthole astronomy community.

loudWaterEnjoyer ,
@loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A friend of mine asked where to find it

RGB3x3 ,

It would be federation within federation! The administration overhead would probably be nuts.

mookulator OP ,

Yeah the more I hear counter arguments from people on here, the more I think the best solution is for communities to group together and opt in to cross posting with one another. Are you saying thats a flawed idea too?

Llamajockey ,

Isotopes

Paria_Stark ,

I would love this. Don’t hesitate to upvote this github issue for the backend to allow this kind of things. Until it’s managed in the backend there is no way apps will efficiently implement this feature until it is managed in the backend.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

There's also issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.

admiralteal ,

What to would like to see is flipboard-style communities where mods import and curate other communities/magazines. I'm not fond of too much happening automatically, but certainly would enjoy seeing someone more in the weeds than my assemble the best of fediverse for a particular interest.

ApollosArrow , (edited )
@ApollosArrow@kbin.social avatar

I would love a feature like this, but for the opposite, so I can automatically block magazines/communities that have specific words

hardypart , (edited )
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

Easily the most requested feature. I guess we’ll see a solution at one point in the future.

sexy_peach ,

No, because they are indeed different communities. On reddit there is no way to subscribe to similar communities at once as well.

deweydecibel ,

Yes there was. It was called multi-reddit.

sexy_peach ,

Oh thanks I didn’t know that.

dismalnow ,
@dismalnow@kbin.social avatar

Great feature. Not what OP is asking about.

You had to seek out each subreddit individually to add it to a multi-reddit.

flipht ,

This - I loved multireddit but it wasn't an autosub. It was just a convenient way to organize your subs once you had them set. If I was feeling too burnt out on the news, I could switch to a multireddit with just cats, hobbies, and food.

Kichae ,

Being able to one-click subscribe to all communities with the same name known by one's instance is a frequently asked for feature, so I can see it coming down the pipeline, but no, it's not a thing yet.

Even short of that, though, it would be really nice if the community search page had subscribe/unsubscribe buttons right there in the search results. It would at least make it easier.

mookulator OP ,

The other way to go is to automatically cross-post across federated servers if they have the same community. Why doesn’t it work like that?

forgotaboutlaye ,

I could see it being taken advantage of, say I start a community on my instance called c/games, and crosspost a bunch of offensive content across all federated servers. But I’m still new to this and might misunderstand how it works.

kemal007 ,

I’m new too but that was also my thought - that it could lead to a lot of bad acting, but what do i know

forgotaboutlaye ,

Yeah I am also new and have no idea how it really works

NotAPenguin ,

Because they are not the same communities. Think of them as different subreddits about the same topic, like reddit has r/gaming r/games r/pcgaming and so on.

wjrii ,
@wjrii@kbin.social avatar

I think the specific way that Lemmy/Kbin are growing is not exactly how the creators, particularly the Lemmy devs, envisioned it. I think they believed people of a specific interest or ideological leaning would band together on an instance, make a few communities that were relevant to them, and federation would allow their work to be shared and for them to venture out to participate in whatever they thought was neat. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are probably Lemmygrad and the Star Trek instance that hosts three communities related to Star Trek (memes, general discussion, and deep-dive nerdery). I think the notion (I doubt it was a fully formed plan) was that instances would have relatively little overlap in the types of communities, and even less in the content.

How growth is actually happening is seems to be turning out fairly differently. Reddit is basically having these little spasms (or maybe just coughs at this point) where a few thousand people leave at once, and many of them are heading to L/K instances. Sometimes we don't quite fully understand federation when we arrive. Sometimes federation is down for a bit. People are basically flocking to established but previously tiny general instances with no particularly strong agenda, and seem to be creating communities with no particular concern about fragmentation.

This may not have been how federation was envisioned, but it creates its own kind of flexibility, where instead of X% of communities being at risk when an instance goes dark or goes crazy, it's Y% of content. I think giving users the option to adapt to this state of affairs by implementing something like persistent multireddits we could subscribe to or just a setting to "autocollate" identically named communities would be really helpful, eventually. In the meantime, trying to understand how we got here makes it easier to accept where we are, and hopefully lets me stay on the right side of the line between being a valued user and a pain in the ass, LOL.

BullsOnParade ,
@BullsOnParade@lemmy.world avatar

I’m not sure if it’s for the same reasons, but Andro.id is another example of an instance around a common intent/subject, with communities based on topics within that subject area.

Interesting concept but agree that if that was the intended means of propagating the fediverse, it doesn’t seem like it’s happening as planned (but still in a very viable way).

blakerboy777 ,

I kind of wonder if we’ll see more interest focused instances continue to be a relatively regular occurances. I could see communities around specific games deciding to make a new home for themselves if for no other reason than everyone gets a new @myfavorite.game handle and you can customize a little more to their tastes. I think it might still lean more heavily towards generalized instances but maybe the main reason to run a new instance will be to be interest focused.

wjrii ,
@wjrii@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, no reason the two paradigms can't coexist, but the "we want a new reddit" one should at least be considered. Not my call, ultimately, and I'm happy to be patient, as even if the vast universe of "healthy" niche communities on reddit never quite coalesces here, it the threadiverse is already viable as a big-c "Community" and a small percentage of redditors landing here could be a game-changer without attracting too much attention.

marmo7ade ,

We will see more focused instances when moderation starts to overreach. Not if, when.

Kichae ,

Because they're different communities, and that would just be spamming a bunch of people you're not directly engaging in.

It's the mail flier version of community engagement.

Consider a community callled "politics" on lemmy.ca. Do you think they will want to be flooded by posts about American politics? UK politics? German politics?

No. Probably not.

They're a different community, made up of different people, and if you don't want to engage with that community in any real way, you should not thoughtlessly and automatically post things to it.

drumdonuttea ,
@drumdonuttea@kbin.social avatar

@Kichae

When you search for magazines on kbin, it does have the option to subscribe/unsubscribe in the search results.

Cr4yfish ,
@Cr4yfish@lemmy.world avatar

takes notes for my own App 👀

DrQuint , (edited )

Subscribing to all would be a really good step already.

But we all know what we all really want, ultimately, is to also then see all those subscriptions as a single feed, instead of having to visit all of them in order.

What was one subreddit is now multiple. Something as small as 5 subs can be something as big as 20 communities here, and if one topic becomes big, then all subs of that topic will dominate your dashboard. Grouping up communities would be a way to tell the dashboard to not overload us on one pf the things and also to give us a way to browse just the one topic you want at the moment.

ebits21 ,
@ebits21@lemmy.ca avatar

I think there has been talks before of some kind of groups on the Lemmy GitHub. So maybe in the future. Likely not a priority right now.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Not exactly what you're looking for, but kbin's search functionality can give you a list to find every community with that name that's federated on their instance:

https://kbin.social/magazines?q=astronomy

While it's not a one-button solution, it does make subbing much faster. Note that on Kbin, communities are magazines (aka subreddits).

bdonvr , (edited )

Just pick the most popular one. The rest will slowly die.

The website UI shows active users, use that metric.

variants ,

just like reddit, you search for a subreddit and see all the ones that didnt take and find the one with the most content and subscribe

deweydecibel ,

And that’s how we ended up with subs rulled by really terrible mods but no one ever bothered to help build up an alternative.

This right here is where centralization comes from. People refusing to try smaller communities, gravitating toward the biggest ones, and suddenly you end up beholden to whatever the admins of that place want, because the community is rooted there.

What we need are multi-reddit style systems where you can combine all smaller instances into one feed, instead of only picking the biggest.

variants ,

yeah that is a good point, I guess I just need to see how it would be implemented. I use browse.feddit.de to browse for communities and just subscribe to all the ones that relate to a topic, I wouldnt want it to automatically subscribe me to new instances that have the same community because they might do it for trolling or something, maybe the search bar just needs to be improved so we dont have to use outside services to be able to browse all the communities out there

bdonvr ,

Yeah but nobody wants to split discussions.

These multi-communities. How would they work? They’d have to be curated by the user - which is a dead end since 99% won’t bother. Or else curated by someone else which leads to politicking about who’s listed and who’s not.

And what happens when you go to post? You have to pick one? And worry about who will see it and who won’t? Again, most users would find this burdensome.

Or it could just be like a hashtag and go out into one big conglomerate community. Who hosts that? How is it propagated? How does moderation work?

I think communities curated by a number of people passionate about each subject is just the best way for forums of this nature to work, realistically.

If a community gets too bad, they can and will be fractured and eventually one dies.

Ideal? No. Just what works best.

Multi-communities is a feature we need though. I just don’t think they’re a solution.

Nemo , (edited )

The website shows active users on your instance, not overall.

bdonvr ,

No, it shows subscribers for your instance, but overall monthly users.

My instance has just over 100 users.

This is what I see:

https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/d80ada79-88e8-4b72-8cd2-a77323587d3f.png

hardypart ,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

I heard you only see the subscriber count from the own instance, not all together. So there’s no accurate way to tell which one actually is the most popular.

bdonvr ,

Subscribers yes. Active users no, that’s total.

My instance has just over 100 users.

This is what I see: https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/9b294bf0-ea54-4882-9f9f-ffdeed9ce015.png

hardypart ,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

Interesting info, thank you.

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