Karu 🐲

I was genuinely hoping to see some examples of it, as I am honestly concerned about the safety of trans people on Lemmy due to recent events. But despite being subscribed to a few Hexbear comms myself, my detectors hasn’t gone off with them.

I am, of course, also concerned that transphobia is sometimes only being used as the subject of concern trolling to push more hostile actions against openly leftist instances.

There has been recently a heavily transphobic drama involving a certain non-binary user with a neopronoun that got massively dogpiled on, for no good reason that I could actually find, and the transphobia was not exactly coming from Hexbear or any tankie instance.

I’m open to reevaluating my relationship to that instance if transphobia is something that they allow or indulge. But sadly, I need receipts to ensure that you are not just disingenuously weaponizing the concept of transphobia to shit on an instance you don’t like.

You cannot assume that communities with the same name are meant to be on the same topic.

Say I set up an instance focused on discussing parties at home. There are fun in-person games you can play with your friends when many of you are over, so I would create a community c/games for discussing them. Now, what if I want my instance to federate with lemmy.world? They already have a c/games that is dedicated to videogames. Maybe I also would need a community dedicated to videogames, but I’d have to call it c/videogames, because I already have a c/games.

Some human intervention would be required to let the network know that the local c/videogames is the one that has to federate with lemmy.world’s c/games, and not the local c/games.

Maybe an automatic suggestion would be fine as a starting point, but it would be more useful that communities themselves could explicitly establish which remote communities they are associated with, without depending on the names.

The idea that I’m talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I’d like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don’t also follow them independently.

This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.

The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn’t achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.

There was some proposal that I have seen multiple times on Lemmy and at least once on the GitHub repo that communities should be able to subscribe to each other much like users can subscribe to communities. I vastly prefer this to other proposals such as auto-merging communities with the same name, which I can think of a few ways that can go wrong.

It would also be reasonably intuitive for the average user, since following stuff is already a familiar action you take on social media. You wouldn’t really need to understand the quirks of federation to know why posting to one community makes it appear on other downstream communities. And as far as I know about ActivityPub (which is admittedly not much), it’s not a stretch use it to implement a feature like this.

I wonder if this proposal ever reached anywhere.