Just starting to familiarize myself with everything after about a decade at reddit. I understand that you can view content across instances but I’m noticing that both kbin and lemmy have similar (competing?) magazines/communities.
For example @PCGaming and !pcgaming (lemmyworld) but then there is also, @pcgaming, [email protected], etc.
Do I have to subscribe to all of them? Or are there “official” fediverse communities?
As I said, I’m still trying to figure things out, but subscribing to so many similar communities seems cumbersome for the user and (imo) fragments userbases that are literally talking about the same thing.
Thanks in advance!
You don’t have to subscribe to all of them, just subscribe to the ones that give you the vibe you like.
There’s no such thing as “official” communities, because every instance could potentially be the next big thing, and every instance could potentially disappear tomorrow. That’s sort of annoying for people who just want one good community, but it’s one of the strengths of the fediverse. Some people will really like one instance and some people will hate it. Unlike with reddit where there’s only one /r/books, there’s as many as we have instances and people can go where they like and avoid where they hate.
I do think that if Redditors (like me) arrive in waves and continue to set the tone, we will see pressure on front-end developers to figure out a way to conflate identically named communities in the end-user UI. It would take federation in a slightly different direction than expected, but it provides resiliency in its own way. For instance if a large instance supplies 50% of the “tech” articles and defederates or collapses, users still get 50% of the experience with no additional effort. I’m sure there are knock-on effects I’m ignoring, though.
I could imagine something similar to reddit’s multisubreddit feature, whereas in this case it’s different magazines/communities from different instances or even services.
I think a possible way forward for this that won’t necessarily affect federation directly is to allow a user to combine different subscriptions into a custom “list” or custom “magazine”/“community”. Then on the user end, it looks like 1 combined feed, but in the back end, it’s still just a bunch of federated communities.
Yeah, I don’t think any changes to the back-end or to Activitypub would be needed. If something were to come around, I think it would be on the UI side, an app or a change to the web front-end of kbin or lemmy that allows custom “multireddits,” or simple collapse of identically named comms/mags. I would even say it should be an option, not a standard behavior.