Lemmy @lemmy.ml sup @lemmy.ml 2y ago

Are communities server-specific? i.e, is the "Gaming" community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org?

I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the "Gaming" community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?

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That's right. !Gaming@lemmy.ml is different from !Gaming@beehaw.org

Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn't really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
- well that's confusing
  
  Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
  
  It is different for sure.
  
  The "lemmy-verse" is really just a bunch of separate websites all running the same software that talks to each other. It's like email, where you can send an email from a Gmail account, and receive it on an outlook account. The same concept being applied to social media now.
- Unfortunately that breaks the concept of federation. I expected servers with good relationships with each other to replicate posts, otherwise what's the point of federation?
  
  The point of federation (on Lemmy) was to allow the different websites to talk to each other. So your lemmy.ml account can talk to most other websites that run lemmy software. This means create posts on external communities, comments, and be able to follow such communities. For now, the choice was made to keep communities local and not locally federated.
  
  They do replicate
  
  So in this case @gaming@lemmy.ml and @gaming@beehaw.org are two different communities, both of which can be followed, and both of which federate to anyone that follows them.
  
  It's similar to the way multiple closely related subs can exist on reddit. And it will resolve in the same way, with the users ultimately deciding
- Makes sense, thank you!
- How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?
  
  https://browse.feddit.de/
O wait, the whole federation allows federation of just users and not communities?
So all this time I have been looking at posts just on the main instance and not posts across all instances?
fugggggggg so now I have to go search for communities of same name on all other instances as well and subscribe to them? ok, fine. How do I do this? there should really be something that automates this process
- Something I noticed. If you visit "All", it contains posts from multiple servers, so that can help with discovery.
- No, communities are the main federated item in lemmy.
  
  For example, !calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone is also viewable from here: https://lemmy.ml/c/calckey@lemmy.blahaj.zone
  
  I would argue that "viewable from" is a far cry from truly federated. The fact that I have to subscribe to infinitely many individual communities to see all, say, "Technology" content across all of lemmy seems like a near-fatal flaw to me.
  
  Do instances "subscribe" to get the communities of other instances? Or how does it work the "all" filter?
- It's not a big deal, as the posts to these communities and thus the communities should be in your ALL tab anyways. As long as someone on your server already follows them.
- they are federated in the sense that they're an email-like entity. it's just they're not all merged together I suppose.
- It's a loose federation of communities. Each server has its own communities that are pushed out. Meaning you can end up with 20 different gaming communities as each one will list the server they're part of. It's not like usenet where the newsgroup name is the same regardless of what server you're on.
You can have multis, and you can subscribe to multiples at once.

I have about twenty different gaming subs on all different servers subscribed, so I'll see any one of them in my feed.

Does it matter which one posted what I'm looking at?

Not really.
- So that's how you do it. Nice so you can also combine closely-related topics. I do think as a new user (like myself) it's a bit daunting that I can't just subscribe to 1 of each topic but potentially have to go seek out the multiple versions of it on different servers, let alone keep up in case new servers come around.
  
  Maybe there could be a centralized list of multis you can subscribe to and these would be maintained for you, or something like that.
So, the way that I figured it, you could have the !something@someserver concept, which I call groups (lemmy calls them communities), and the collision of those (say, !something with no server), would be called "regions" because they'd be several competing communities trying to use a shared resource. Moderation of a region would be a nightmare.

You could probably make a reddit-esque "multireddit" style view that represents the "regions" concept - just know that you are posting to a particular community with particular mods, in the end.
Just pick the one with most activity.

Also be aware that Beehaw doesn’t federate with Lemmy.world, the biggest instance in the Lemmyverse.

67 comments