• Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    We need… something like a “transfer, merge, fork, split” for communities.

    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 !newcommunities@lemmy.world if you are splitting from a power tripping mod.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      4 months ago

      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: !somewhere@lemmy.world

      For example, we could have cloned this sub and its contents and merged it into c/politics.

      • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        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

        • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
          01·
          4 months ago

          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.