ActivityPub wise this could be modeled pretty cleanly as (what Mastodon calls) boosts. Or perhaps quote boosts as implemented by every software except upstream Mastodon (including Mastodon forks like Treehouse or Fedibird), if different comment threads are needed.

Hell, let's make cross posts work like that.

In the meantime, third-party apps can combine posts from multiple communities (that have the same URL) coalesced one single post, and pull comments from every instance's post.

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it's indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post.

This is effectively how the Community-following-Community proposal works. I’ll repost what I commented in this thread:

I still believe the best solution is the ability for Communities to follow other Communities. That is essentially a fully automated version of this sibling proposal.

This has been explained in great detail by ‘jamon’ here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecomment-1595273502

This basically lets Communities opt to federate directly with other Communities, abiding by the same network dynamics as the fediverse at large, I.e. cross-network moderation by (de)federation.

Here’s a succinct description of the problem that C-C following solves:

If you are an active user (not moderator) of Lemmy, the requirement for this becomes apparent almost immediately. One of the biggest strengths of these forum are communities-at-scale. Being able to easily post and interact with large groups of people is the benefit to the user that makes Lemmy (and all other social media) appealing.

As a user, I recently wanted to post to AskLemmy. Almost every single instance has thier own separate AskLemmy implementation. Naturally, I'd tend to post to the one with the most users. But inherently, I'm missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to [email protected] (which had 3k users), but by doing that, I'm missing out on the users from lemm.ee, behaw, lemmy.world which in total are far more than 3k.

There is already a FEP for this functionality: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366?u=erlend_sh

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it’s indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post

Some discussion about how crossposts could work differently

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3827

If not that then give us the ability to have relative references to posts inside of Lemmy. Instead of referencing a URL to a specific instance, kind of like the ! Or @ for for community names and usernames.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

I wish it was. This is a disconnected duplicate, not a proper cross-post. Actual cross-posts are linked to each other in the title section, making it easier for participants to visit the other discussion(s).

I don’t think there’s really a good reason to keep communities split.

The federated nature of the fediverse with all it's implications.

An instance hosting a community might

• become unstable
• disappear forever
• defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
• same for the instances of other users of that community

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in

• moderation style
• policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

I think it's good to have some redundancy both as a backup and to have some choice. As with all things fediverse, we don't need to find a consensus. Those who like to have one big instance or community can join the biggest. Those who prefer some diversity can spread out and create duplicates. Reality will most likely always be something in between.

Another approach could be to ask: Why are communities split? If you're right and there's really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often? Maybe the prevalence of the phenomenon hints at reasons which exist, but are not well understood.

Didn't .world admins force-reopen the Android communtity here after they decided to merge with the community on lemdro.id? I'm not sure how well that's gonna go with this community considering at least 2 mods here seem to be admins of .world, unless the community on .ml comes to here.

The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.

Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access [email protected]. They have to access [email protected].

On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.

So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice, otherwise the audience they want to reach won't see their content.

Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.

That’s exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.

I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.

Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.

more discussion about multi-communities here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

The issue is when it's the exact same content, just duplicated, which is the case for the Fediverse ones

A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Completely agree, and I mentioned that in the post as well.

The issue with the current two Fediverse communities on . world and .ml is that they are pretty much the same. There is no adding values in posting and discussing the same things twice.

I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.

You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.

That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?

This is a really shitty way to express your disagreement.

And the fragmentation is definitely an issue worth discussing. It's a lot more prominent here, in my opinion, than reddit, and that could discourage potential users.