Is there a way to subscribe to all communities with the same name?
Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?
Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.
Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.
I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?
I'm making an App for Lemmy and I'm planning on adding that feature. I also want to make it so you only have to register once and the App can register you to all the instances you choose automatically.
Registering to all instances with the same username/password is just asking for trouble. They’re not all equal and some of them will get hacked somehow.
Very good point! I think @[email protected] has a good idea on how to circumvent that.
I could make my own database with hashed passwords using postgreqsl and RLS, which is pretty secure. The User then decrypts the hashed passwords once on login and is simultaneously logged into multiple instances of Lemmy to get the JWT of each instance, which is then stored in SessionStorage or even in a Cookie if the User wants to which would make this a one-time process.
On signup the User could just register to one instance and then I just generate random 32 Character passwords and hash them with the Users' password, then get the JWTs and if cookies are enabled the that would only have to be done every year or so (or when the User deletes the Cookies).
This whole process is seems pretty easy, especially if you've done something like this before and I'm betting some other App Dev is already taking notes lmao.
Edit:
Let's also do a thought experiment on what data will be leaked if I did this 1:1 and the database gets somehow hacked:
For each User:
Username (=> Gives away that you use Nemmy)
Hashed Passwords (=> Hashed passwords cannot be read if you don't have the original Users' password until we have access to quantum computers which can literally crack the encryption algorithm)
What if users could just configure their own named groups for communities from the various instances, and when you view the group you'd see a feed from all of them?
Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge
I think I could deal with duplicates pretty easily by checking if different properties of the post are identical, the more are the less likely it is that the post will be shown.
I think a bigger problem is the comments. What if a user reposts a post from r/astronomy on lemmy.world to c/astronomy on lemmy.ml?
Which one do we show, and what do we do with the comments of the other? Merge them together, or just leave them? Maybe show a button on the post when there's a duplicate und the user can switch instances?
Lots of figuring out to do, but it sounds fun!
Edit:
The Group-by-Hashtag thing is also a good idea! That would of course make the whole thing less of a headache, but to make that work a lot of users need to do that.
Yeah, it's a web app. I route all requests through my own backend, so it's server-server communication between Nemmy and any Lemmy instance, circumventing CORS by design.
Are you sure the CORS settings are messed up? I tried reaching the API a couple of times from my frontend for debugging and got errors due to authentication security. Are you referring to that or something else?
Being able to one-click subscribe to all communities with the same name known by one's instance is a frequently asked for feature, so I can see it coming down the pipeline, but no, it's not a thing yet.
Even short of that, though, it would be really nice if the community search page had subscribe/unsubscribe buttons right there in the search results. It would at least make it easier.
Subscribing to all would be a really good step already.
But we all know what we all really want, ultimately, is to also then see all those subscriptions as a single feed, instead of having to visit all of them in order.
What was one subreddit is now multiple. Something as small as 5 subs can be something as big as 20 communities here, and if one topic becomes big, then all subs of that topic will dominate your dashboard. Grouping up communities would be a way to tell the dashboard to not overload us on one pf the things and also to give us a way to browse just the one topic you want at the moment.
I think the specific way that Lemmy/Kbin are growing is not exactly how the creators, particularly the Lemmy devs, envisioned it. I think they believed people of a specific interest or ideological leaning would band together on an instance, make a few communities that were relevant to them, and federation would allow their work to be shared and for them to venture out to participate in whatever they thought was neat. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are probably Lemmygrad and the Star Trek instance that hosts three communities related to Star Trek (memes, general discussion, and deep-dive nerdery). I think the notion (I doubt it was a fully formed plan) was that instances would have relatively little overlap in the types of communities, and even less in the content.
How growth is actually happening is seems to be turning out fairly differently. Reddit is basically having these little spasms (or maybe just coughs at this point) where a few thousand people leave at once, and many of them are heading to L/K instances. Sometimes we don't quite fully understand federation when we arrive. Sometimes federation is down for a bit. People are basically flocking to established but previously tiny general instances with no particularly strong agenda, and seem to be creating communities with no particular concern about fragmentation.
This may not have been how federation was envisioned, but it creates its own kind of flexibility, where instead of X% of communities being at risk when an instance goes dark or goes crazy, it's Y% of content. I think giving users the option to adapt to this state of affairs by implementing something like persistent multireddits we could subscribe to or just a setting to "autocollate" identically named communities would be really helpful, eventually. In the meantime, trying to understand how we got here makes it easier to accept where we are, and hopefully lets me stay on the right side of the line between being a valued user and a pain in the ass, LOL.
Because they're different communities, and that would just be spamming a bunch of people you're not directly engaging in.
It's the mail flier version of community engagement.
Consider a community callled "politics" on lemmy.ca. Do you think they will want to be flooded by posts about American politics? UK politics? German politics?
No. Probably not.
They're a different community, made up of different people, and if you don't want to engage with that community in any real way, you should not thoughtlessly and automatically post things to it.
I could see it being taken advantage of, say I start a community on my instance called c/games, and crosspost a bunch of offensive content across all federated servers. But I'm still new to this and might misunderstand how it works.
Because they are not the same communities. Think of them as different subreddits about the same topic, like reddit has r/gaming r/games r/pcgaming and so on.
I would love this. Don't hesitate to upvote this github issue for the backend to allow this kind of things. Until it's managed in the backend there is no way apps will efficiently implement this feature until it is managed in the backend.
Would you want this to work retroactively also? Like if I spun up an instance with a community called astronomy with only pictures of buttholes that look like galaxies, should that be automatically added to the community group? What if I started the most legit instance with a community called astronomy with a bunch of my university of space scientist buddies, would that also be retroactively added to the community group?
I think it's a cool idea to be able to subscribe to all communities of a similar name. But it's kind of akin to following a hashtag eventually as the fediverse grows.
It would be pretty cool if communities could federate, but that would be p much like a content load balancer. Like if 5 different instances all had an astronomy community that was sync'd across all 5 instances. You wouldn't have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance's community. Like raid for social media lol.
Okay. That's a good point. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. (I'm basically just getting into Lemmy myself here) but yeah, there's room for some bad actors there lol.
I guess the real solution is like you said, let communities say, "hey, we think they're cool and want to share content with them"
You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community.
I've thought about something like that as well. I think it would be a pretty convenient feature.
I want this as well. For example, I am a teacher and want to find teacher related discussions. I really don't care which instance it is on. Just gimme the teacher drama and organization.
Do I need to make several accounts to subscribe to them all? I'm kinda technology impaired and don't understand internet stuff easy.
Yeah the more I hear counter arguments from people on here, the more I think the best solution is for communities to group together and opt in to cross posting with one another. Are you saying thats a flawed idea too?
I would like to keep things as they are now and simply add a sign up button next to the instance in the search window. That way they all stay separate but it doesn't take a lot of extra clicks to get signed up for everything. Or maybe we just have some site hosted by Lemmy devs that crawls for instances based on a keyword search that let's you sign up from there.
Technically a notification could be if a instance using the same name pops up, but that wouldn't be that simple. I don't think its that tedious to check the list every once in a while.
As to the design I had an idea. It could be a list of instances using the name and at the top it has a join all button. Then instance has its own join button.
Sometimes one of them will be just bot posts pulling their content from Reddit or somewhere and it’s kind of annoying, like spam. So sometimes you might want to join one but avoid the other.
You're already seeing Karma farmers on the front page with the reposted piss meme, the north Korean awards memes, uncreative people will attempt to dilute any platform they can find.
Same people that copy your homework and pat themselves on the back or take credit at work for your idea.
I get it if that post from reddit can spark some inferesting discussion between lemmings. What I don't get is people copying posts from AITA or stuff like that, where the original poster is looking for responses from the comments. I saw one for the LTT subreddit and I'm kinda torn on that, because it can spark some discussion, but its not like LTT is actually going to interact with a bot copy of the subreddit.
I heard you only see the subscriber count from the own instance, not all together. So there's no accurate way to tell which one actually is the most popular.
And that's how we ended up with subs rulled by really terrible mods but no one ever bothered to help build up an alternative.
This right here is where centralization comes from. People refusing to try smaller communities, gravitating toward the biggest ones, and suddenly you end up beholden to whatever the admins of that place want, because the community is rooted there.
What we need are multi-reddit style systems where you can combine all smaller instances into one feed, instead of only picking the biggest.
You wouldn't necessarily want this since communities are different depending on the context of the instance it may not be relevant to you. It would be great however to be able to create combos of the communities you subscribe to.
I think a good middle-ground would be if someone could manually create a public community group that combines multiple communities into one, and that other people can subscribe to. That way you can have manual curation and avoid issues with spam, unmoderated communities, and inconsistent names (e.g. /c/catpics vs /c/catphotos)
EDIT: after a few seconds of research, I learned this is what "multi-reddits" are, and people are already asking for it lol
Or maybe the community owners could do it? Seems like a natural extension of federation is for communities to track their counterparts in the federated servers
Yeah there would be plenty of circumstances where you wouldn’t, like politics or local news or something. But I have to imagine there are more circumstances where you do want it. I said this below - what if the community owners grouped themselves with their counterparts, kind of like sub-federations
I actually think that you're hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).
Communities should work more like hashtags. If you "subscribe" to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what's on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.
Combine those two things and you've made something powerful.
I understand the intent and it's a valid feature to want, but this just isn't going to work. How does the app or server know all communities named "whatever" are actually about the same "whatever"? Wouldn't bad actors just create communities with the same names as anything that became popular? And what about the massive number of duplicate posts every time a story big enough that all the communities post it?
I totally get why someone would want this, but it's complicated
What to would like to see is flipboard-style communities where mods import and curate other communities/magazines. I'm not fond of too much happening automatically, but certainly would enjoy seeing someone more in the weeds than my assemble the best of fediverse for a particular interest.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but kbin's search functionality can give you a list to find every community with that name that's federated on their instance: