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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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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