Is it possible to merge two existing communities on different federated servers?
Is it possible to merge two existing communities on different federated servers?
I believe more and more people will escape to lemmy sooner or later, and I already see 3 different communities for the same thing (selfhosted) here on lemmy. Time will tell which one will be the most active, but lets assume all of them will be equally active and the desire emerges to combine the two communities about the same thing, is that something possible or intended to be possible with federated services?
I think this is currently one of the biggest problem of Lemmy on the UX department. Non technical users from Reddit will only expect one "subreddit" for a theme, but if they search on Lemmy, they'll find more than one community with the same topic, and it'll confuse them and make them less likely to come back.
But that's the way how Fediverse work, so I don't think combining two communities should be done from the Fediverse side, but rather each Lemmy instance can curate a "playlist" or "multireddit" that has some of the biggest communities from the users' server and other federated servers about the same topic, and users can subscribe to the "playlist" rather than individual community.
Eh, reddit really isn't much better in this department. It's not uncommon for multiple subs to exist for the same userbase (r/memes vs r/dankmemes, r/christian vs r/truechristian). Over time users figure out which is which, which is the main one, and which is for them
True, but they are all with different names, and they are not completely the same (as in different rules, more specific topic vs general topic, etc). But on Lemmy there is a possibility that two communities having the same exact topic and name for example !technology@beehaw.org and !technology@lemmy.ml, they are both discussing technology (and not any specific difference between them).
The "multireddit" aspect also makes sense to me. Thank you for elaborating an alternative approach to what I had in mind. I don't know if such a feature is yet implemented, but for the time being, one could just subscribe to all the communities and it will be fine.
This would be cool and useful
Yeah, totally. Maybe, If it's not yet possible, one could submit a feature request. However, I am totally new to the fediverse principle and don't even know If it's supposed to work at all.
I don't know how Lemmy or Kbin work internally, but I believe merging 2 communities could be similar to a user migrating to another server. Account migration on the Fediverse works by having the old account being setup as a pointer to the new account, effectively merging the old one into the new one. Followers of the old account will automatically follow the new account.
Since Lemmy and Kbin's communities are, behind the scene, like user accounts boosting messages posted in them, you can see how a community could be marked as "migrating" into the new one.
Another option would be for a community A to automatically boost/repost all posts from a community B, effectively bringing all messages of B into A.
Note that these are pure speculation on my part. I don't know if any of this is possible 😅
Yeah, I don't know anything about the actual ActivityPub protocol, but having communities point to each other seems like a way of not only combining communities, but also letting sub-communities within them merge and fork as they see fit.
This would be a very useful feature. Hopefully it will be added at some point!