Communities not existing on all instances is a big problem.
Example, Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world have duplicate communities aren't connected at all. So we are artificially isolating groups more and making it confusing for would be converts.
Short and too the point
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One of the things that I'm experimenting with is to have "communities that can follow communities". So, if community A follows community B, then it can re-post anything that has happened on Community B.
If you do it "properly", it doesn't even need to be a lot of data duplication because the "follower" community would just be creating Announce activities.
The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of "mah privacy" or something silly like that.
Hi! We should chat.
NodeBB also does this, and currently still does. A category (group actor) can follow another category (also a group actor).
It essentially is synchronization of categories using 1b12.
Proof of concept does work but it needs reworking in some ways. The largest issue is that Lemmy itself doesn't understand when a group actor tries to follow a community.
How would comments happen? Would they not get back to the original poster?
Sorry, but this will be a bit too technical...
The thing is that Lemmy (at least, others probably do the same) don't treat the Linked Data as the canonical representation, they work by translating every message with an as:Activity to their own internal representation in the database (with separate tables for Posts, Comments and PrivateMessages).
This means that all it takes for a Lemmy instance to treat a post as "new" comment is to produce an "as:Announce" attributed to the "follower" community, and then all instances will process it as a new post/comment/vote.
Alright, so
User posts to A, a "as:announce" on C is generated. A user replies to the post on C. Will user A see the reply? Will someone looking at the post on A see the activity on C?
Yes. When the reply is posted to C, it is sent to A. A then sends as:Announce to C, as well as any other communities that follow it.
B seems to be irrelevant here.
They are still separate communities. Users following only A will not see the posts from C. Users following both A and C will everything.
The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of “mah privacy” or something silly like that.
Don't hold out out of that. There are idiots everywhere and they should not be taken as a good driving force for anything.
Half the point of the Fediverse is that your activity is public. It's the entire point of why have activity with a community or instance in the first place. Heck, it's "kinda" the name of the protocol: "ActivityPub".
Thank you for the encouragement. In principle I agree with you 100%, but we also need to keep in mind that this corner of the internet is extremely averse to having their presence exposed outside of their original context.