After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to multiple similar communities to individual users.
While the diversity that instanced communities provide is a significant benefit, I guarantee most users - including myself - are just waiting for frontrunners to emerge. This will eventually kill most of the potential upside to instanced communities, which arguably should develop in slightly different ways, to specifically push against echo chambers.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no good way to create meta-communities either collectively or individually. So, rather than rebuild reddit functionality (that I would only find useful here in the Fediverse, due to the fragmentation) I had a thought.
Would it be possible to create either explicit Lemmy/kbin functionality that allowed both for the creation and centralized updating of meta-communities?
The thought would be that individuals and groups could effectively add new community instances to centrally managed lists - like a package manager, of sorts. Users could generate lists of communities/magazines, and then (if the meta-community was public) invite people to subscribe to that list for future updates. Upon joining a or running an update to an existing meta-community, the system would check to see if the current instance and user was properly federated in order to engage with that specific instance of the community.
I’ll admit, I’m new, and haven’t dug deep enough into any of the technical documentation to see how much of this is possible, and I’m willing to bet it could be layered on top of Lemmy/kbin via plugins and apps. That said, I’m not sure that’s how it should be done in the future. Thoughts?
edit: more clear detail from comments below:
The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, [email protected] and [email protected], both instances of “android” communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two “android” communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same “community”.
The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to “update” their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.
The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.
There is nothing preventing the creation of meta-communities other than writing the code to put things together.
Using the Activitypub protocol a group is nothing else but an actor that announces (“retweets”) every message that is tagged with its name.
To have meta groups you would have an actor that subscribes to a list of groups and announces (“retweets”) anything that shows up in its feed.
Currently you could make a sort of meta group by having a bot user account that subscribes to several communities and announces everything it sees. The only problem is that Lemmy doesn’t yet let users follow other users or retweet content.