Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.
I’m new to the whole concept of federation, so please let me know if I’m missing something fundamental, but with your proposal (subscribing to all c/pickles) works for when each instance has the same general rules for posts, but what about when one c/pickles on some server is actually about… dildos? (like r/trees was about pot, and r/marijuanaenthusiasts was about trees)?
Wouldn’t your feed be polluted with pics and reviews of dildos when you want wholesome and healthy pickle recipes?
That’s where manually being able to block specific instances would come in. So if you subscribe to every c/pickles your instance federates with but then didlos.lemmy/c/pickles starts causing problems, you could manually block that one instance. Or maybe you want to see dildos but not when you’re looking at pickles, you could choose to manually exclude didlos.lemmy/c/pickles from your c/pickles subscription
That makes sense, but sounds like it’d be a constant spam battle. Maybe I’m overthinking it, or just thinking about how I’d go about breaking/attacking something to try to figure out how to fix it.
Yeah it could be, but keep in mind it would only include communities from instances that your instance federates with. So if your instance has blocked another instance it wouldn’t be included in the group. This issue actually describes it really well and is better thought out than what i’ve described https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113