this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Unless I've misunderstood something, community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you're just not looking at the full name.
[email protected] and [email protected] are different names, for example.
Sometimes we ignore the part of the name after the @ if it's unambiguous, but it's still there.
tl;dr: I agree with OP that the ability to have multiple, identically named, disconnected communities on different instances will be a severe detriment to the adoption of the Fediverse by the general public.
That's part of the problem. The simplest UI generally exposes the community name without the instance, !memes for example, but the backend is really [email protected] which is an entirely different community from [email protected]. Now, that's not really a problem - memes are memes. But what about a community for Edinburgh, UK? There are already two - [email protected] and [email protected]. That's going to be an issue because if you choose one to participate in, you'll miss all of the content in the other. If you're a member of, say sopuli.xyz, you won't even know that either exist because their community search doesn't actually search all instances and might start a third. The whole idea of the Fediverse is to have a federation of instances which share information, and there is already talk of the biggest instances potentially creating a problem with the democratic ideals of the system (6 days into the reddit migration and three of the largest instances have defederated from one another). To have a thousand instances each with their own !Photography or !ManchesterUnited community dilutes the content and interaction.
I agree with OP ( I actually don't know how to link to a profile yet or I'd tag @TerryMatthews) that there should be some cross-linked mechanism to merge identically named communities across instances. There could still be detached instances - defederated content would not have their content propagated - but the content for each unique community would be co-mingled.
I would expect that moderators would be limited in scope to their own communities. So a mod from feddit.uk could block a non-instance post or user on their instance but it would be present on other instances. They could also block a local post on their instance and it would not be propagated at all. Pinned posts get a little more hairy - would every mod have a separate set of local instance pins? I would think that would need to be the case. The issue of sidebars is also an issue.
The ability to create multis could solve that. I could make a local Edinburgh multi, sub to both of the communities, and view them together in one feed for example.
That would definitely fix the reading side of things. As would a reader/aggregator app which allows browsing (and discovery) of all the Fediverse instances as a unified feed. It still leaves the challenge of propagating information though communities without either leaving large swaths of the community in the dark or risking multiple posts (for people who do multi./aggregate). The last programming language I can claim to have studied is Fortran (77, no less), so my hope is only that someone competent shares my concern.
The "two Edinburghs" situation already existed on Reddit. You'd get slightly different "competing" subreddits. They'd have to differentiate their names a bit but it still happened.
To flip it round - there was an issue in Reddit that whoever first set up a subreddit with a given name then owned it forever. Let's say I got there first for /r/london but then I'm a twat and either create a community of horrible people or fail to build a community at all. Everyone in London who wants a city subreddit is worse off, and at best someone has to come along and make a different subreddit with a different name to fulfill the same person. Not having this single namespace with "first mover" advantage is good and democratic. And all we have to do is pay attention to the bit after the @ sign.
That’s fair. Sometimes there are competing/unfriendly communities on the same topic (EliteDangerous and Elite_Dangerous sub mods hate each other with a fiery passion for…reasons). Since writing my post I’ve stumbled upon another poster suggesting a fix may be on the user side (a fediverse aggregating reader) rather than attempting to somehow weave communities together on the server end. That does mostly what’s needed (imho) without requiring any additional overhead on the instance ends.
This kind of reminds me of Android vs iOS. With great freedom also comes fragmentation.