this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
72 points (93.9% liked)
Fediverse
28713 readers
70 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People can do it currently. I've done it a few times, for all for cases. You just make an announcement on the community, or on [email protected] if you are splitting from a power tripping mod.
How does this work? Are you just talking about starting a new group on the same server?
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)