When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It’s the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue with Lemmy/kbin not talking nicely, or is this how the Fediverse is?
Is it (at least theoretically) possible for me to post an article on https://kbin.social/m/startrek and have it automatically show up on https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek, or are they always going to be two separate communities?
This could be achieved within the UI and seems like a good idea.
Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.
Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store. The community/instance should be columns you can search for, it would be a small SQL change.
Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI and retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client.
The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).
The solution here would be to default to the local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop downso users can choose.
You’d probably open yourself up to magazine poisoning that way. Would be easy enough for a troll to spin up a new community or entire new server that helpfully drops spam into magazines with the same name. I think I would prefer users be able to create meta-magazines that will aggregate posts from multiple federated/local sources.
Technically can’t they do that even now?
Sure, I guess. Truth be told there are probably lots of vectors for spam to come in until the moderation tools get a big overhaul.
That’s just a moderation tool. A community would simply need the ability to run a whitelist or blacklist of communities to aggregate.
Frankly, I think a more manual process as an option is better because it would help account for naming variations. It’d also allow a mod team to create a place SPECIFICALLY to aggregate, which strikes me as inherently useful even within an instance.
How about something that works like this?
https://i.imgur.com/qDuT1oz.png
looks good