Piefed apparently implemented something similar to proposal 3

Have they? Blaze linked to a thread on the implementation of Piefed “feeds”, which is a form of Proposal 2 (multi-communities). Have they also implemented Proposal 3 (communities following each other) as well?

I really hope the devs consider Proposal 3, as it seems like the solution which best fixes fragmentation.

What if we choose @[email protected]?

About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking !pancakes@a.com with a pinned thread like “go to !pancakes@b.com”.

If you aren’t already the moderator of n-1 communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:

• Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
• Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (difficult)
• Get people, many of whom are reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (sometimes impossible)
• Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the n-1 communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)

It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.

That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).

the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links

Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover.

I respectfully disagree. In two minutes, I can easily find all the communities on a given topic and subscribe to them all. The problem is not discovery. The problem is fragmentation of the user base, as explained by popcar in their blog post:

Alright, time to post. But where? pancakes@a.com and pancakes@c.com are both somewhat active… Should I post in a and crosspost to c? Maybe there’s hope in other communities kicking off again, should I crosspost to b and d as well? Oh no, am I going to post 4 times just to find my fellow pancake lovers?!

Let me take this a bit further: After crossposting to all 4 pancake communities, I get three comments. One in a, b, and d. Each comment is in a separate post and none of them interact with each other unless the poster opens each crosspost separately.

I do not see how Proposal 2 (multi-communities) solves the issue of fragmentation of the user base, while Proposal 3 (communities following each other) solves this quite elegantly.

Would still need to solve the ‘where’ do I post

Proposal 3 makes that a non-issue. If pancakes@a.com and pancakes@b.com follow each other, a user can post to either community and their post will show up on both communities, with a shared comments section.

I don’t foresee significant moderation challenges, but if any unresolvable issues did come up, communities could simply unfollow each other and go back to being separate communities.

the biggest issue is that it’s not going to happen any time soon

Yes, Lemmy development is slow, but Proposal 3 seems like such an elegant solution to me that I think it is worth striving for. There’s also no reason all three Proposals can’t be pursued in parallel, as they each have their own use cases.

Merging communities can be done now, as you are well aware

Yes, but it’s a bit of a pain, as you are also aware :)

Excellent write-up of the problem and its potential solutions!

Do you know if Proposal 3 has made it to the Lemmy devs? If so, what was their response to it?

If a user wants to see all the activity on a given topic, they very much do have to.

That’s more like Proposal 2, and doesn’t actually solve the main issues with duplicate communities. Proposal 3 solves them quite elegantly.

Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.

The “merging” in Proposal 3 would be mutually opt-in by community moderators, not forced.

It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results.

Who gets to determine if a community is dead or not? That seems like a form of centralization.

it feels to me that the only easy/obvious solution is to rely on a centralized system

What are your thoughts on Proposal 3?

Because problems could arise by relying on a single community. Proposal 3 retains the duplicate communities while eliminating the problems that duplicate communities currrently cause.

no active admins

Admins or mods?

If a community has no active mods, you can usually request it from the admins. If an instance has no active admins, it will probably shut down soon.

Well, merging communities means trying to reduce the number of alternative communities on the same topic, or did I miss something?

No, that’s Proposal 1. Proposal 3 means retaining a number of alternative communities on the same topic while syncing posts and comments between them.

How would automatic grouping work?

Even if the communities are grouped, a given post or comment would still show up in only one community, and people not using the grouped view wouldn’t see it. Proposal 3 would solve that issue.

similar community with different rules.

In those cases, the communities should not consolidate, and would not “follow each other” under Proposal 3.

It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones

Everyone will be different, but I can attest that these types of decisions do slow my workflow down:

• Which communities could I post to?
• Are there any communities my instance hasn’t federated with yet? (Check Lemmyverse.net)
• Should I post to all of the communities?
• Just post to the most subscribed or most active?
• Post to the smallest and crosspost to the larger ones?

This can take more than just “a couple minutes”, and I’m pretty sure I am in the minority of users, even on Lemmy, who are willing to put in the effort.

Proposal 3 in the article seems to be an elegant solution which also does not give a single community all of the power.

the right model, right in the sense that it will work with/feel much more simpler to most users, is a centralized system and not a federated one?

How is Proposal 3 not a federated model? Communities would choose to mutually share posts with each other.

Because that defeats the purpose of Federation

Isn’t that addressed in the article by Proposal 3?

Of course there are going to be some communities about Harleys in there and of course one of those is going to inevitably skew towards white nationalist nonsense

In that case, the rest of the motorcycle communities would simply unfollow the problematic one.

No, it would not. In proposal 3, communities would still choose whether or not to follow each other, just like instances choose whether or not to federate with one another.