So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.

How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.

  • Flelk@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    Makes sense not to do it by default, but I think the option to form a single coherent community across servers is crucial to avoiding platform-killing fragmentation. Otherwise what’s even the point of being “federated?” It’s just a bunch of separate servers.

    • poVoq@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml. This is what federation was always about.

      What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms. Federated content is AFAIK already replicated on the connected server, so it seems feasible to implement something like that, but there are probably some details in the ActivityPub specs that make it difficult to do so (for example: I think AP does not allow substituting the sender).

      • Flelk@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml.

        Sure, but again I come back to the question of, what’s the point of being federated then? I may as well just be using a local client to present me with a set of RSS feeds from different websites or something.

        What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms.

        And that’s how I’d assumed Lemmy was going to work until I saw this post. It seems intuitive to me that subs of the same name would at least have the option to “sync” across servers.