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?
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?
The same problem existed on reddit, and it will resolve in the same way. There are often overlapping communities, but ultimately, the users will decide what works, and one or two of them will win out.
What’s the point of federation then?
There’s not just one server or one entity that controls everything. If one server shuts down it doesn’t shut down the entire service. And even though having multiple communities on multiple servers named the same might not be ideal, it’s also a feature. If you really don’t like the mods of one community on one server, you can join a similar community on a different server. You can think of the servers like cities. Every city has a game store, and this way you can access all the game stores at once. You might have a favorite community on a favorite server and that might be where you create your new posts, but you can still read and participate in the discussions going on in similar communities on all the different servers.
Great analogy. One of the great things about the internet of old though, was that you automatically got exposed to all of the ideas out there, not just the ones in your city. :)
That’s possible with Lemmy too. Just make sure you select the “All” filter when browsing instead of just the “Local” filter and it should show you all the federated posts.
People should really see naming conflicts, not as a negative, but a positive.
If you have two cities that run their own lemmy servers, say Wales and Wellington, they can each have their own
!newscommunity, like:wales.lemmy.com/c/newswellington.lemmy.com/c/newsThis is a good way of framing the concept.
I think the point is more that the federation is visible and confusing to your average end user.
It avoids centralisation. You can simply defederate from nazi instances, and the whole platform can’t be sold out from underneath you.
And for someone like me, who is trans and runs several instances for the gender diverse community, I’m able to curate the experience so my users don’t experience constant hate and aggression. So if someone is posting transphobic stuff that doesn’t get actioned on their home instance, I can block that user (or their whole instance) from mine even if I’m not a moderator of the community.
That or what happens is that everyone goes with their local server’s version and the federation isn’t as heavily user. At present on lemmy.ml, you’re presented with Local by default and you have to actively switch to All to go outside the server. It seems a bit as if they’re selling the idea of federation while also not promoting the idea of federation once you’re logged in by having ‘All’ be the default view.