this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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I meant in a technical sense. As in, hey here is a community with a mod on a power trip. I'm going to clone it, it lives here now: [email protected]
For example, we could have cloned this sub and its contents and merged it into c/politics.
But then what prevents someone from cloning a community to 50 instances, or cloning 50 community to 1 instance? Seems like an easy abuse vector
Yeah idk. This was a criticism that I brought up of the fundamentals in lemmys structure early on: it selects for, effectively, clones of "whole reddits", when it should be set up to support more balkanized instances.
Basically, lemmy.ml's c/Politics is functionally redundant to .worlds c/politics; but thats by design.
What I think would be better would be adding tagging and taking federation a step further. Every post needs a 'tag'; we steal that part from mastadon. It can have many, but it needs at least one, say #politics in this example.
Then, on instances, federation happens both at the instance level but also at the community level; communities can federate with other communtiies. But all posts get #tagged on the way in the door. Communtiies can then federate or defederate at will, and if neccessary, a community can "branch"; for example, maybe they want to split off US politics from politics; then you grab all the posts with the #US.
As far as an abuse vector. Thats just hang wringing. IF your mods are that abusive for a large sub, you've got way bigger issues. Which, if it did ever happen, is something that "forking" would solve. Mod on a power trip? No problem. Fork the community.
Tags also bring issues from a moderation perspective. Who can decide who can use tags to label which type content? Seems another way to have everyone spamming trending tags on all type of contents without control. I think tags work better on a microblog format than community format, where you can potentially reach out everyone following that community/tag much easily than crossposting each time.
I was more thinking about people wanting to ruin things by importing huge communities to small instances, consuming their space and resources, and making it confusing to people to know which one is the "legit" community.
And if you limit this feature to admins, then requesting communities is already possible from admins on most of the instances, so that covers the transfer. Fork/split (what is the difference, btw), as I said, can be done manually now.
Importing a community is the one use case remaining, but I see why it's not a priority for the Lemmy devs, there is bigger fish to fry at the moment (multicommunities for instance)