I don’t see why that is necessary, as different posts could be hosted on different instances. Either way, the choice of instance is of little concern for me as an end user, so it should be de-emphasized.

I think we might be talking past each other. I understand that not every instance is federated with every other instance, and that there are differences between the instances.

Each instance is one piece in a larger mosaic – but looking for niche interests inside one particular instance is a bad venn diagram. The choice of instance should be of secondary consideration when it comes to niche interests. I barely care from what instance someone hails if they’re giving me cooking advice. This is why we have federation in the first place – it just needs to be a smoother experience.

When I want to post about metroid, I want to reach everyone on lemmy who is interested in metroid. I understand that people are not homogenous. On reddit, I expect a range of opinions. Different instances perhaps serve to adjust the distribution from a smooth continuum to something more lumpy. Perhaps there is value in that, but I think it’s outweighed by the value in reaching a larger portion of lemmy.

I’m not asking that we centralize communites to be hosted on a single instance. I’m asking that communities with the same name on multiple instances appear to the user to be merged. In this way, a community can grow and benefit from network effects, but no one instance controls the community.

Federation should be the point. I didn’t join Lemmy to join yet another reddit-like service but with far fewer users. I joined it because I want to be on something like reddit but which no one group controls. Otherwise I’d use threads, bluesky, etc.

It’s a good question. Perhaps nobody needs to control it. Users of c/foo post on their own instance (or choose an instance to post on). Mods are responsible for posts on their own instances (as before). The difference is that when viewing c/foo, you see posts from all federated instances.

For news, politics, etc, which might cause trouble if combined, here’s a solution: Perhaps if your instance’s c/foo community has the “keep separated” flag enabled, then users on your instance browsing c/foo won’t see posts from other instances, and users on federated instances won’t see your instance’s c/foo posts when browsing c/foo.

Right, so, in some circumstances it wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea to join identically-named communities.

Maybe it should be more like the multireddit idea – people have to manually set up the links between the communities.

I think the benefit of federation is that nobody controls the whole ecosystem. The downside of federation is splintering.

Look, this is just my take – I think this is bad UX. I’m not saying federation isn’t a good idea – on the contrary, I like the idea that many different posts in the same community are all hosted on different instances. Sure, for a community like news it doesn’t make as much sense – fixes for this would be that some communities don’t have the behaviour I’m suggesting, or the convention is to call it sao_luis_news or something.

Not a change in user behaviour. How about: communities on different instances with the same name appear as one community essentially. As in, all instances’ version of that community appear in your feed if subscribed, and when viewing posts in a community, all instances versions of that community are visible.

Perhaps the user can restrict to just one instance’s community or just the local instance’s community with a button (like local/all), if that’s their preference.

Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don’t give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it’s a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I’m federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.

On this day 16 years ago, using Ubuntu led to a girl dropping out of college.

I used a computer without any hard limits since I was 2 and I turned out homose🏳️‍🌈 just fine.

Actually on second thought I have crushing depression and feel terribly unsatisfied at my job as a software engineer, maybe you have a point.

in the case of discord, it’s not convenience, it’s the network effect.