Just saw this on AskLemmy at .ml, thought this and chuckled, and now here we are.
Will take the opportunity to thank our admins for what they do, and all you humans for being here and generally being cool.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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It would be nice to see a way of unifying communities on multiple instances for redundancy and improving the situation with redundant communities across instances.
I'd imagine it would probably need to be an opt-in option on a per-community basis where one community can request to unify with another one, then from the other community the moderators can accept or reject the request, then the posts, scores and comments would be mirrored and maintained simultaneously across instances. Differences in block lists between instances would probably be a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Bigger challenge might be latency problems with the mirroring and federation but there's enough existing redundancy protocols that allow for servers with rediculous latency so that's probably also not insurmountable
It's really on the mods to accept to consolidate in one community.
All the issues you mention in your other paragraph are why this is probably never going to happen.
I'm mostly talking out a technical solution for community redundancy, similar to setting up redundant VM hosts or more accurately like redundant network hardware, where the data and configurations all exist on both servers, and might be load balanced to some degree between both servers, but ultimately should one go down there's no loss of uptime as the other server takes over until the time that it's mate comes back online or a new one is setup and connected
But that's infrastructure redundancy, it should rather happen there than at the Lemmy level, no?
Mods are generally not going to surrender their power, especially as differences in moderation techniques is what most often leads to new community formation in the first place:-).
Other than PieFed's Categories of Communities, the only other ways I know of to make Topic aggregations like that is to either find and switch to using an app that provides such (I have heard of at least one, but I don't recall which:-), or else have many Lemmy accounts and constantly switch between them - like one for News, another for Memes, etc. Or you can browse by All, and see mostly only memes and news from the USA all the time:-P.
But PieFed provides numerous methods handle this: not only Categories but also Topics to aid community discovery, and you can trigger Notifications for anything - a person, a comment, post, or even an entire community.
One day very soon I strongly believe that PieFed will surpass Lemmy in terms of usability. It already has in so many ways, though not quite all.
I'm thinking more unifying communities that either have the same mods or for annexing communities with inactive mods, and I keep referring to redundancy because that's the specific purpose in my mind, with the side effect of cleaning up the multiple dead communities with the same name on various instances.
There's a real risk in the Fediverse of the one server hosting a community going offline, and we've already seen at least one notable Lemmy host shamble on as a zombie server with absent instance administrators. Instead of forcing communities to tell eachother to migrate or to recreate themselves on a new instance should one disappear suddenly, by having the community effectively load balanced and replicated across 2 or more instances is a lot more resilient
I fully respect when moderator teams have different opinions running similar communities with different rules and expectations and in not saying that should be taken away. I'm just thinking about technical solutions to improve overall Fediverse health
There's a reason the current Lemmy sourcecode is named 0.19.8 - this is beta version software, awaiting very many changes to reach completion. Heck, reports don't even reach moderators on remote instances yet, as the whole drama with 196 is showing (they left the mod reports there for days, then got mad when the instance admin did what she said she would and cleaned up in the absence of the mods being willing to do anything about the situation).
But people either don't know Rust (it's reputedly difficult), don't want to deal with those developers, or simply don't want to help with the writing of code. Hence the creation of K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks to deal with the former pair of issues, though not catching up to feature parity with Lemmy yet (except PieFed is already quite ahead, in some ways even though not ready for the masses in some fewer but more foundational and crucial ways).