this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
I agree, to an extent. You're right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it's miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you're expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can't really "fix" this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it's not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There's no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it's not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they're horrible)
I love this idea, but you would need a list of communities for a given topic, and some way to curate it.
Having 'no single source of truth' is part of the joy.
If you're not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you're out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself