As lemmy grows organically, there will be continuous increases in duplicate communities. This poses a long-term problem because I don’t think most people want to subscribe to half a dozen or more communities that are essentially the same.
Is there any chance that the thought leaders of Lemmy which probably includes the largest servers owners could come together and start proposing ideas?
I see a potential troubling issue with the idea in terms of combining the existing history of the duplicates communities.
Perhaps a new concept of community@global could be thought through.
I’m more worried what will happen when instances start going down permanently. The decentralization makes sure the whole concept can’t collapse all at once, but unless some sort of migration/linking is implemented in the future this isn’t that far off from the old times with random bulletin boards and personal forums that you might just find gone one day, all content and accounts permanently lost to the sands of time.
@JohnEdwa What happens is that people move to other instances and maybe start one with their friends, happens all the time.
Account migration will come to lemmy/kbin, and group-migration is really as easy as saying “Hey everyone, here’s the new address”
@MasterBlaster @dusk
I do think some of the larger ones may end up being their own instance in the federation, both to help reduce burden, and to help ensure stability of their content. It will be interesting to see which ones are able to be self-funding through donations (or even ad monetization/corporate sponsorship in some edge cases.)
@Veritropism Very likely. One would hope that the Microsoft Support Forum is hosted on Microsoft’s servers, say, for sure.
If I end up using it a lot I’ll host my own eventually, but doubt I’d have to pay to host popular groups on it.
@MasterBlaster @dusk @JohnEdwa