This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
When will there be default view agglomeration of posts sent to identically named communities. For example /c/books. The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform. If I go to /c/books on any server, all posts of all federated servers’ /c/books should be visible. This way no server owner gets the stranglehold on the community that they host.
See here.
see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I’d like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Sure, that’s not the point at all. But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn’t post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it’s the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn’t add anything?)
I currently don’t have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you’re not allowed or it’s bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That’s perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
Why wouldn’t they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics
Which is another centralization incentive.
Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.
Going to the biggest local community of the biggest instance is always the way of least resistance.
And that’s how you make a worse reddit with extra steps.
There are plenty of politically neutral instance. Most of them are, actually, the only ones that come to mind as politically oriented are hexbear, lemmygrad and to an extend, lemmy.ml.
That leaves lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, all the feddit.country, discuss.tchncs.de, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.zip as neutral alternatives
Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?
Lemmygrad still can send all the kulaks to the gulags. But only when the discussion happening inside their hard drive. Aka “I take my ball and go home”
They do not get to silence the rest of the fediverse/c/books