How should we deal with similarly named communities?

As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It's the way federation works, it's not something that can be forced on people.

I would like to see some kind of "canonicalization" feature in Lemmy to support this, similar to CNAME in DNS.

For example, !android@lemmy.world recently merged into !android@lemdro.id, where lemdro.id is the canonical server.

So it would be awesome if !android@lemmy.world was entirely equivalent to !android@lemdro.id. But as it stands, the lemmy.world community had to lock and everyone had to individually migrate themselves.

Essentially, in a case like this, I just want to call it !android (or c/android) and not need to care about which server it is hosted on. But as it is currently, I always have to reference the canonical domain since it is different than the one my account is on.
- For example, !android@lemmy.world recently merged into !android@lemdro.id, where lemdro.id is the canonical server.
  
  Off-topic and what follows doesn't mean your CNAME idea is bad, but it's important to highlight that this example is wrong because the "merger" was forced because current mods were victims of imposter syndrome and felt obligated to gift the community to Reddit mods on another instance and denied us 19k members a say in this, and we are right now requesting to cancel it because it was a one person move. See more context in my comment here: https://lemmy.world/comment/980033 . In short, there is no "merger", it is a rogue mod move and if you liked !android@lemmy.world and never asked to move, I recommend you stay because I believe we can absolutely defeat this hostage-taking and reopen the community.
- Aliasing is a thing on Mastodon user accounts. There's no conceptual reason it couldn't be extended groups on other platforms, too.
  
  At the same time, if group aliasing became a thing, one should not expect that one group become an alias of another. Centralizing communities doesn't always make sense, and our Love of Large Numbers is something we should actually actively push back against.
  
  Aliasing makes sense when you have a dozen tiny communities, none of which are large enough to be self-sustaining. Once communities have crossed the critical limit and become viable all on their own, we really shouldn't actually want them to merge with other viable communities. Smaller communities are easier to moderate, are generally friendlier spaces, and the promote a larger diversity of opinion and active, meaningful discussion.
  
  Bigger ones devolve rapidly into jockeying for attention.
  
  If you're only going to read 10 or 15 posts in a community, be it one of 1000 users or one of 10,000,000, then you're generally going to be better off with the 1000. Anything big enough to make it to the top of the big blog will probably be discussed in the small one, too. But the opposite is just not going to be true.
- This is how Threads would take over the Fediverse and eventually win when they decide ActivityPub development is too slow and holds them back.
  
  Boom all your communities are now empty.
  
  Federation works because we’re spread out. Just subscribe to all the small communities.
  
  Now, what might be a better idea is a cross post functionality where the crosspost has a single identifier of its own so it only will show up once in your feed (I guess as your local instance)
  
  That way you can have the ability to reach everyone as if you had posted a bunch of times, but a big popular corporate instance can’t gather up all the communities and then defederate and wall them off.
- That's one idea that I pretty much like. There's also programming.dev. We could kinda naturally move all programming related topics there.

It may just take a while for the go to communities to hit a critical mass. The same thing happened on reddit for smaller topics, one will eventually have the large majority and the others will die

It is no different than reddit. Eventually one community will have the momentum to dominate a space and everyone will gravitate to it over time.

The only feature I think we need is an admin curated keywords option for mods to add in search results for communities. Like people often search for bike when they mean bicycle. The old reddit community name for bike repair is called bike wrench. It is the same here. The main community for bikes in general is Bicycle. People may or may not find communities based on these keyword differences.

And that could be Threads, unfortunately.
- It could not be threads because threads is like Twitter and Mastodon, not Reddit and Lemmy.
  
  And I very much doubt that Zuckerberg has any real interest in creating a Reddit-like app.

The easiest option ATM would be for an app to combine both communities into one synthetic feed

It would be neat if communities from different instances could federate with each other like the instances themselves do.

In my mind it would work like this:
If two communities have the same topic, and have compatible rules, then they could federate with each other. This would show the posts from both in a combined view in whichever instance you were logged in on.

For moderators there would be two types of posts.
Posts originating on their instance they would have full mod control over, and any actions taken on the posts would change the post for all other communities they are federated with.
Posts originating from federated communities I think mods should be able to hide in the local communities as well as a subset of other mod abilities, like sticky. However these would only affect the local copy, not the original or the other federated communities.

As far as I know neither Kbin nor Lemmy has anything like that, but I think it would be a great feature if either could make something like that work.

I'm not a programmer so I have no idea what's what, but the functionality of that sounds really cool and would serve really well to uphold the whole "social media as a decentralised, non-static web of communities" framework going on here
Honest question: If a federated community is conceptually acting as a single community, why should moderators be limited to the side corresponding to their instance? At that point, wouldn't there be a unified ruleset for the federated community that is separate from the rules of the hosting instances?

I get that not all instances would abide by the same rules, but I reckon that if you want to keep a federated community, you also need to make sure to comply with all instances or risk some instance from removing their community from the federation.
- I think there are a couple of reasons to not allow mods on one instance to moderate posts on another instance.
  
  One example I can think of, if I wanted to grief a community I might go to another instance that doesn't have that community, create it, making myself a mod in the process. Then I would request federation with the community I want to grief. Then I'd mod away all their posts, or do anything else I wanted. With some luck and okay timing I bet a person could do a lot of damage before federation was turned off. People in IRC chat rooms used to use a similar technique to steal OP from others in rooms. Making modding of federated content only effect the local instance would contain any of that damage. As a feature creep sort of feature, perhaps modding done on an instance could send a suggested mod response to the originating instance, and they could do what they wanted with the information.
  
  Also, having it set up like I originally suggested could allow for other non standard federation arrangements. Like one instance that allows nsfw content in a community to be federated with one that auto blocks anything marked nsfw. Maybe even one way federation, where an instance shows posts from another in a community, but it isn't reciprocated. I don't think that would be usually the best idea, but it might work.

i honestly think a good way to do this is give communities the option to be apart of the same network and merge like IRC does. so you Federate to see different communities like we do now and merge posts from different servers as a layer on top to show one community. now do i know how to do that not a clue. I also think something like a side bar webring would work as well.

I don't really see it as an issue. Post it to whichever community you are most active on. If people want to part of that particular instance, they will see it and interact with it.

Just like I'm interacting with this post right now even though I'm not on lemmy.world. I'm quite over what became the gamification of karma on reddit, and really hope it doesn't become a thing here. There's no reason about having to worry about which instance to post something to, people will find it and interact with it.

Make no mistake if the fediverse keeps gaining traction there will still be gamification so long as there are points associated with posts. Even more so since profiles are generally less anonymous than reddit.
- Even more so since profiles are generally less anonymous than reddit.
  
  How so?
  
  My profile tells you I use an instance (in this case my own, dusty-radio) and my username on that instance (in this case Dusty). All this tells you is the name I've chosen and that I host this myself. It's no different than if I was Dusty on reddit, other than the instance URL.

Isn't that the purpose of the fediverse's concept? Have several communities and if you don't like the moderation for example you just go to another one or create a new one. Definitly problematic for niche topics though

There is no "we" that's empowered to do anything on the fediverse, and that's by design.

You, as an individual, are free to start or register with whatever instance(s) you want and start, engage with, subscribe to or block whatever communities you want. And all the other users here are exactly equally free to do any or all of those things.

It's safe to assume that over time, activity will tend to concentrate in a few specific communities, and that most notable topics will come to have a dominant community. I think, snd self-evidently many others also think, that that's something that should happen organically over time rather than being forcibly implemented by some authority. But more to the point, that's something that only can happen organically and over time, since nobody has the authority to do it any other way.

How did you handle it on Reddit?

i honestly think a good way to do this is give communities the option to be apart of the same network and merge like IRC does. so you Federated to see different communities like we do now and merge posts from different servers as a layer on top to show one community. now do i know how to do that not a clue. I also think something like a side bar webring would work as well.

It's kinda annoying how many instances there are. Lemmy isn't popular enough for each sub to have 5 or 6 segregated subs for each topic.

I mean, are thousands of people not enough to have in your question-answering network?

Like, at my job I’m extremely lucky to have three people to whom I can go to ask questions. Three people is a huge resource.

And I would like to add to all the answers. Instances are like countries that have their own values and rules. For example, technology@beehaw.org will not be the same as technology@lemmy.world. Beehaw is a heavily moderated instance, while Lemmy.world is more "free". What can be posted on technology@lemmy.world will not necessarily be the case on technology@beehaw.org.

I'm finding that subscribing to similar communities/magazines is the easiest way, e.g. subscribing to the Android community on kbin.social / other locations I can find.

I'm trying to comment and interact with whatever community / content I can find to get robust discussions going.

There are issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.

I’d like to see it user controlled myself. I had a MultiReddit with all of the bicycle Reddits I joined so the could all be grouped together. Then when I wanted to read about bikes, I jumped to my MultiReddit for bikes and it had all the various subscriptions there in one place because I grouped them that way. It would be great for something similar on kbin. 😊👍
- I want to be able to create my own if I want to. But also I think it's important not to make everyone recreate that same work. Do it say, they should be public by default, with the option to make a private one.

The easiest option ATM would be for an app to combine both communities into one synthetic feed

In a perfect world I'd like to see some kind of meta community system where the individual communities still exist but kind of automagically cross pollinate with each other so that users, server, and moderation load is split somewhat democratically. Not going to happen any time soon since it would probably take dev work and they have their hands full.

Practically what will probably happen is certain communities will become the "standard" ones and others will be smaller versions, just like there were countless "true" subreddits.

What you can do is subscribe and post to whatever one you like, and then feel free to cross post to other communities. Cross posting works really well on Lemmy.

This would likely cause moderation issues across instances with similar subject matter but different rules. We don't necessarily need to share the load across instances like that. Simply federating as normal should suffice, and what we really want is a separate tool on a layer between the instance and user that can gather a lot of related instances and bundle them into one supercommunity.

I think this is very doable and would most likely be done in the form of a Lemmy/Kbin mobile app or website front-end. Something that doesn't dig its grubby mitts into the way the actual communities themselves are operated, but can integrate lots of them together into a convenient feed using some logical rules. Communities that want to be included in a service like this can place tags in their sidebars, in a standard configuration easily parseable by a bot, which can then easily aggregate content from appropriately tagged and crawlable communities. Communities without tags are either skipped, as it's a sign the owner either does not want to be included in the supercommunity or else has not done the requisite minimum to be considered worthy of inclusion, or else loosely bundled anyway using whatever half baked keyword matching a bored dev decides to cook up. Duplicate links in the feed can, at user option, be removed (leaving only the link to the post on the largest community/with the most engagement/on a selected default community) or posted anyway, giving an option of reducing spam or being easily able to engage with all communities.

Comments sections will be a little more difficult, but I'm a fan of a tabbed system where you can have separate sections to show comments from each instance that is commenting on a duplicate link.

Given the time and motivation I probably could eventually make this myself, but I have neither, so instead I talk about it here in the comments section and hope someone else takes up my torch. If anyone wants to actually use my stupid ideas, I give you free and full license to do so with or without crediting me for it. Go forth and build shit.
- Yeah that's essentially the system I was thinking of but more something the communities could opt into with each other, and could easily moderate how much and what "meta" content made its way into their community.
  
  Big communities would probably just share common posts between each other like they might use a mega thread for, small communities might pull more "meta" content to keep activity up. But making it all an opt in kind of thing on the community level.
  
  The main reason I think it needs to be a core part of the software is just buy in. Like, whatever the solution to this thing that apparently a lot of people think is something or an issue, it needs to be pretty well supported by everyone. Like, apps, instance admins, mods, they kinda all need to be on board - and that probably means something coming to the closest thing this whole mess has to a top.