Let’s say I have 2 instances that are federated: instanceA and instanceB.
These instances have many communities, and two of them has the same name. The “c/comX”. So there is comX@instanceA and comX@instanceB.
I know that if I have an user in instanceA, I can see content from instanceB in the “All” view of the Lemmy UI. But what if I only want to see the “comX” posts?
I went into the community view for comX in instanceA and could only see posts from that same instance. Is there a way to see posts from a specific community but fetching posts from federated servers with the same community name?
Like a view in which I can see all posts from comX@instanceA and comX@instanceB, and all the other instances with comX that are federated with instanceA too.
The full name of a community includes its instance so in fact they are two different communities, not two with the same name.
Yup. So there’s no way to federate on the community view?
If I want to see content from c/gaming from multiple instances, I need to connect to each instance and browse the content on the community view.
Would be nice if users could create view groups or some kind of abstraction. This is per client, so no need for instance admins to do anything about it, federation between instances is already established.
For example, I could configure my Lemmy client to:
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Enable same name federation on a per community basis. This means I could go to the c/gaming community of instanceA and say “show me federated content for all communities with the same base name from other federated instances”.
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Create a “Custom Feed” in which I can say “I want to see these communities here”. So I could create a MyGaming custom feed and add local or federated communities that I consider relevant to a subject.
Just ideas, I don’t think they are bad at all, would make Lemmy more comfortable and more abstracted from instances. It would also create a sense of cohesion between communities from different instances.
Yes that would be a very useful feature, maybe something in your profile page to group communities or even something as a simple as checkbox to group them on the communities page.
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Communities of the same name on different instances are basically completely independent, you can subscribe to both or only one of them or none of them and will see the posts from any community you are subscribed to in your subscribed view.
Yeha, but it would be nice if I could see content related to a single topic across multiple instances.
Imagine I want to see gaming content across multiple instances, for example. It is not possible with the current way the client works.
This could be solved with custom feeds or enabling federation on the communities with same name.
It would make more sense to configure that manually. You don’t want e.g. a community on one server about Rust the game to be mixed with a community on another server about Rust the programming language.
You also can’t see everything in the All view, only posts from communities on remote instances where at least one local user is subscribed to the community will show up there.