I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?

  • federico3@lemmy.ml
    81·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately that breaks the concept of federation. I expected servers with good relationships with each other to replicate posts, otherwise what’s the point of federation?

    • JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social
      111·
      1 year ago

      The point of federation (on Lemmy) was to allow the different websites to talk to each other. So your lemmy.ml account can talk to most other websites that run lemmy software. This means create posts on external communities, comments, and be able to follow such communities. For now, the choice was made to keep communities local and not locally federated.

      • pfak@lemmy.ml
        9·
        1 year ago

        It sounds more like identity federation. I think it’s going to be very confusing for a lot of people.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      31·
      1 year ago

      They do replicate

      So in this case @gaming@lemmy.ml and @gaming@beehaw.org are two different communities, both of which can be followed, and both of which federate to anyone that follows them.

      It’s similar to the way multiple closely related subs can exist on reddit. And it will resolve in the same way, with the users ultimately deciding

      • federico3@lemmy.ml
        41·
        1 year ago

        What you are describing is just a form of “remote following”, which is merely local caching of some content from another instance. As you wrote, each @gaming is an entirely independent community, even if the moderators are the same people across multiple servers. If an instance is shut down the community is gone. If the instance decides to throttle access and start charging money users have to pay or abandon the community. In short, this is not a significantly better user experience than traditional online forums. I’d rather have real federation.