Hey everyone! After my first week of settling in here, I think what would give my lemmy experience the biggest boost of any single added feature would be Multilemmys (or Multicommunities), so we can see the combined feeds of multiple communities in a single streamlined feed. I guess the purpose of this post is to spread awareness of this as a concept and point to the ongoing discussion on Github:
Support for grouping communities / multi-communities #818
Cross-instance ‘multireddits’, that are also automatic and topic-based #1113
I have seen users post that this was how they initially thought the fediverse would work when it was explained to them. I thought this would be the case as well when I joined.
(Edit to add: an older post with discussion on this idea including devs’ thoughts at that time which shed light on why it does not work this way.)
Although I am new to this world, I feel this is one of the most intuitive abilities associated with the concept of the fediverse and that it MUST eventually be possible, the sooner the better.
This is similar to “multireddits”, and the equivalent way to use them would be to combine feeds from different communities that are on the same instance, so for example I have one multilemmy to combine the feeds from /c/politics, /c/news, /c/worldnews, /c/worldpolitics (all on lemmy.ml).
Then additionally with Lemmy we have equivalent communities hosted across various instances, and it would be a new and different kind of ability to be able to combine these into a single multilemmy, so for example I have a multilemmy combining lemmy.ml/c/politics, lemmy.world/c/politics, beehaw.org/c/politics, etc.
I found this idea mentioned a few times around lemmy, where @deadcyclo@lemmy.world and @communist@beehaw.org pointed out the above open github tickets for these ideas.
Those github discussions were a fascinating read for me! Its clear that the boffins have already put a fair amount of thought into these possibilities, and identified questions that will need to be answered such as
- how to deal with communities that have the same/different name but are or are not actually the same subject
- duplicate posts and/or cross posts
- whether to cause automatic/default links or not
- how to implement this in a way that is of most benefit to the health of the lemmy ecosystem
- there seem to be two separate use-cases also: one being communities intentionally linking to share content and the other being a user creating their own custom combinations, either for personal or public use.
- how to handle subscriptions
Discussion continues even this week! After reading through all the ideas, I don’t have any specific preference but I am excited to see what they eventually decide to implement as I’m sure it will be rewarding. Personally I think getting some cross-instance version of this should become a priority as soon as they feel they’ve adequately responded to the reddit migration, which I imagine would be a month or two down the road.
I gotta end by saying how happy I am to be here after leaving Reddit, this really feels like the start of something incredible. Cheers!
