Hi everyone,

I just joined and am now exploring this place. I noticed there already are similar communities on different instances. For example there is a vexillology@lemmy.world and a vexillology@kbin.social. Is there a way to “join” or “sync” these different spaces? Or will they just be separate?

I think It would be nice to connect places like these. As far as I understand it if one instance goes down all their communities disappear. With “synced” communities across instances this could be avoided since they act like a backup for each other.

So far I like it here and am looking forward to how this all works out.

Thanks everyone for contributing and running this place.

  • bryce0110@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This issue on GitHub seems to have an interesting idea.

    Instead of automatic grouping, what they’re suggesting is a sort of “request” from one community to another to sync their content. So two similar communities that have two very different cultures could decline syncing.

    • PriorProject@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’ve seen that proposal. It’s not all that much more compelling to me. If mods were willing to be grouped together, why would they not also be willing to merge their communities entirely and retire one of them? What compelling capability does three but kind of one communities give you that one community with three mods doesn’t?

      And more importantly, are those capabilities more valuable than the simplicity of people not having to understand these compound communities. Federated designs are generally significantly more complicated to use than “normal” designs. A sprinkle of federation in a system design is a very powerful hedge against individuals coopting the ecosystem, and that make the extra complexity worthwhile (to me, there are smart folks who say that federation is DOA because it’s inherently too complex). But almost all people with experience designing federated systems agree that a heaping shovelful of federated system design makes a system an unusable mess of conceptual complexity that no one will bother to learn. It seems pretty clear to me that compound communities fall into this heaping shovelful category, and do no “pull their weight” in complexity. Reasonable people can disagree, but I both would not use such a feature unless I had to… and I think the lemmyverse would be better off without it.

      Instead, it’s my belief that devs should focus on improving community discovery so people naturally find the most active communities, low-traffic ones die off, and we eventually reach a mature state where… like reddit… even though community duplication is allowed… no one cares about it because the better run communities naturally grow and are easy to find. Improving community discovery has more powerful beneficial side-effects in other ways as well, and if done properly could reduce complexity rather than increase it as this proposal does. But to each their own, maybe other people see something I don’t.