Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?
Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.
Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.
I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?
I’m making an App for Lemmy and I’m planning on adding that feature. I also want to make it so you only have to register once and the App can register you to all the instances you choose automatically.
Edit: The Webapp is Nemmy, also the Community c/Nemmy
Edit2: Please note that Nemmy is early Alpha, so not really useable as a daily driver yet.
Registering to all instances with the same username/password is just asking for trouble. They’re not all equal and some of them will get hacked somehow.
Very good point! I think @TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub has a good idea on how to circumvent that.
I could make my own database with hashed passwords using postgreqsl and RLS, which is pretty secure. The User then decrypts the hashed passwords once on login and is simultaneously logged into multiple instances of Lemmy to get the JWT of each instance, which is then stored in SessionStorage or even in a Cookie if the User wants to which would make this a one-time process.
On signup the User could just register to one instance and then I just generate random 32 Character passwords and hash them with the Users’ password, then get the JWTs and if cookies are enabled the that would only have to be done every year or so (or when the User deletes the Cookies).
This whole process is seems pretty easy, especially if you’ve done something like this before and I’m betting some other App Dev is already taking notes lmao.
Edit: Let’s also do a thought experiment on what data will be leaked if I did this 1:1 and the database gets somehow hacked:
For each User:
- Username (=> Gives away that you use Nemmy)
- Hashed Passwords (=> Hashed passwords cannot be read if you don’t have the original Users’ password until we have access to quantum computers which can literally crack the encryption algorithm)
How are you hashing a password with a random 32 character string? I feel like you are mixing terms here or so you combine the password and the random element first or do you mean you decrypt the hash with a symmetric algo and get the 32 char string?
Ah, sorry if I’m being unclear.
I was thinking of combining the user’s original password with a random 32 Character string and hash that combination. So basically salting the User’s password with random strings. That should work out to multiple passwords I can use.
Thinking of it bcrypt does exactly this, so just running bcrypt a couple of times should be sufficient, no?
Security wise if there was a breach, an attacker would still only have a couple of hashes, none of which are the original password and they can’t dictionary attack due to bcrypt.
Also, if an instance was hacked, the worst case would be that the attacker gains access to the hash (if the instance stored passwords in plain text and didn’t also hash them themselves).
I’m really tired right now so maybe none if this makes any sense, but I think it does lol.
Hopefully the app will make site-specific passwords?
For when you tell us the name, @remindme@mstdn.social in 3 hours
Beep boop bop, for some reason I got a reminder and you didn’t, so here is your human-generated reminder:
3 hours have passed. The name of the app has since been posted: Nemmy
Thanks! Also, the bot did answer me but it took a little longer than the reddit remindme bot. Reminder was on time tho.
You got the reminder because you also summoned it. Dunno how/if we can summon it for other people.
To make sure you got your reminder, @remindme@mstdn.social in 3 hours
This would be amazing! Do you have a name for your app yet?
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We need a central registry of communities, aka subreddits, and users.
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Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge.
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Some people are going to cross post but post slightly differently on each instance because they don’t know if their post will be federated
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Maybe group by hashtag instead of community name?
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We should steal the ideas that were good with Reddit and Twitter
What if users could just configure their own named groups for communities from the various instances, and when you view the group you’d see a feed from all of them?
Yes, very good idea! When users create a group, they can select keywords to search for and then the App could make a best guess and then show a list to the user where they can select the ones they want or don’t want in the group.
Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge
I think I could deal with duplicates pretty easily by checking if different properties of the post are identical, the more are the less likely it is that the post will be shown.
I think a bigger problem is the comments. What if a user reposts a post from r/astronomy on lemmy.world to c/astronomy on lemmy.ml? Which one do we show, and what do we do with the comments of the other? Merge them together, or just leave them? Maybe show a button on the post when there’s a duplicate und the user can switch instances?
Lots of figuring out to do, but it sounds fun!
Edit: The Group-by-Hashtag thing is also a good idea! That would of course make the whole thing less of a headache, but to make that work a lot of users need to do that.
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Please link in a format that works for people on different instances: !nemmy@lemmy.world.
Thanks for letting me know, I’m still new to Lemmy :).
It’s a web app? Lemmy’s CORS settings are messed up, I assume you have to route all requests through a proxy?
That was a nightmare for my app
Yeah, it’s a web app. I route all requests through my own backend, so it’s server-server communication between Nemmy and any Lemmy instance, circumventing CORS by design.
Are you sure the CORS settings are messed up? I tried reaching the API a couple of times from my frontend for debugging and got errors due to authentication security. Are you referring to that or something else?
You’ll get a “Forbidden” error and if you check the request, it’ll say “Forbidden: Cross origin requests are not allowed”
Ah, yes the classic. The Lemmy dev team really forgot to set CORS headers on an API lmao. Hope they fix that soon.
The pull requests to change the default behavior was merged!
Nice.
What would be the point of registering across all servers? Is this just to secure your username?
Yes, from what I’ve seen there are a some people who are concerned about others impersonating them on other instances.
Being able to one-click subscribe to all communities with the same name known by one’s instance is a frequently asked for feature, so I can see it coming down the pipeline, but no, it’s not a thing yet.
Even short of that, though, it would be really nice if the community search page had subscribe/unsubscribe buttons right there in the search results. It would at least make it easier.
takes notes for my own App 👀
Subscribing to all would be a really good step already.
But we all know what we all really want, ultimately, is to also then see all those subscriptions as a single feed, instead of having to visit all of them in order.
What was one subreddit is now multiple. Something as small as 5 subs can be something as big as 20 communities here, and if one topic becomes big, then all subs of that topic will dominate your dashboard. Grouping up communities would be a way to tell the dashboard to not overload us on one pf the things and also to give us a way to browse just the one topic you want at the moment.
When you search for magazines on kbin, it does have the option to subscribe/unsubscribe in the search results.
The other way to go is to automatically cross-post across federated servers if they have the same community. Why doesn’t it work like that?
Because they’re different communities, and that would just be spamming a bunch of people you’re not directly engaging in.
It’s the mail flier version of community engagement.
Consider a community callled “politics” on lemmy.ca. Do you think they will want to be flooded by posts about American politics? UK politics? German politics?
No. Probably not.
They’re a different community, made up of different people, and if you don’t want to engage with that community in any real way, you should not thoughtlessly and automatically post things to it.
I think the specific way that Lemmy/Kbin are growing is not exactly how the creators, particularly the Lemmy devs, envisioned it. I think they believed people of a specific interest or ideological leaning would band together on an instance, make a few communities that were relevant to them, and federation would allow their work to be shared and for them to venture out to participate in whatever they thought was neat. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are probably Lemmygrad and the Star Trek instance that hosts three communities related to Star Trek (memes, general discussion, and deep-dive nerdery). I think the notion (I doubt it was a fully formed plan) was that instances would have relatively little overlap in the types of communities, and even less in the content.
How growth is actually happening is seems to be turning out fairly differently. Reddit is basically having these little spasms (or maybe just coughs at this point) where a few thousand people leave at once, and many of them are heading to L/K instances. Sometimes we don’t quite fully understand federation when we arrive. Sometimes federation is down for a bit. People are basically flocking to established but previously tiny general instances with no particularly strong agenda, and seem to be creating communities with no particular concern about fragmentation.
This may not have been how federation was envisioned, but it creates its own kind of flexibility, where instead of X% of communities being at risk when an instance goes dark or goes crazy, it’s Y% of content. I think giving users the option to adapt to this state of affairs by implementing something like persistent multireddits we could subscribe to or just a setting to “autocollate” identically named communities would be really helpful, eventually. In the meantime, trying to understand how we got here makes it easier to accept where we are, and hopefully lets me stay on the right side of the line between being a valued user and a pain in the ass, LOL.
I’m not sure if it’s for the same reasons, but Andro.id is another example of an instance around a common intent/subject, with communities based on topics within that subject area.
Interesting concept but agree that if that was the intended means of propagating the fediverse, it doesn’t seem like it’s happening as planned (but still in a very viable way).
I kind of wonder if we’ll see more interest focused instances continue to be a relatively regular occurances. I could see communities around specific games deciding to make a new home for themselves if for no other reason than everyone gets a new @myfavorite.game handle and you can customize a little more to their tastes. I think it might still lean more heavily towards generalized instances but maybe the main reason to run a new instance will be to be interest focused.
Yeah, no reason the two paradigms can’t coexist, but the “we want a new reddit” one should at least be considered. Not my call, ultimately, and I’m happy to be patient, as even if the vast universe of “healthy” niche communities on reddit never quite coalesces here, it the threadiverse is already viable as a big-c “Community” and a small percentage of redditors landing here could be a game-changer without attracting too much attention.
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I could see it being taken advantage of, say I start a community on my instance called c/games, and crosspost a bunch of offensive content across all federated servers. But I’m still new to this and might misunderstand how it works.
I’m new too but that was also my thought - that it could lead to a lot of bad acting, but what do i know
Yeah I am also new and have no idea how it really works
Because they are not the same communities. Think of them as different subreddits about the same topic, like reddit has r/gaming r/games r/pcgaming and so on.
I would love this. Don’t hesitate to upvote this github issue for the backend to allow this kind of things. Until it’s managed in the backend there is no way apps will efficiently implement this feature until it is managed in the backend.
There’s also issues for “multireddit”-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
I would also welcome blocking all communities with the same name
I wish I could upvote this as many times as I have had to block the same communities on all the instances.
I’ll put this on the roadmap of my App if you don’t mind
Would you want this to work retroactively also? Like if I spun up an instance with a community called astronomy with only pictures of buttholes that look like galaxies, should that be automatically added to the community group? What if I started the most legit instance with a community called astronomy with a bunch of my university of space scientist buddies, would that also be retroactively added to the community group?
I think it’s a cool idea to be able to subscribe to all communities of a similar name. But it’s kind of akin to following a hashtag eventually as the fediverse grows.
It would be pretty cool if communities could federate, but that would be p much like a content load balancer. Like if 5 different instances all had an astronomy community that was sync’d across all 5 instances. You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community. Like raid for social media lol.
/r/asstronomy here I come
Damn that’s a good one. Here take my upvote.
Tell me more about your buthole astronomy community.
A friend of mine asked where to find it
I like the RAID idea, there are two F1 communities on different servers with the same number of subs. they should be synced. no reason to have two
You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community.
I’ve thought about something like that as well. I think it would be a pretty convenient feature.
I want this as well. For example, I am a teacher and want to find teacher related discussions. I really don’t care which instance it is on. Just gimme the teacher drama and organization.
Do I need to make several accounts to subscribe to them all? I’m kinda technology impaired and don’t understand internet stuff easy.
Unless it is on an instance that has federated from the one you’re on, like Lemmy.world and Beehaw, you only need the one account. .
Okay. That’s a good point. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. (I’m basically just getting into Lemmy myself here) but yeah, there’s room for some bad actors there lol.
I guess the real solution is like you said, let communities say, “hey, we think they’re cool and want to share content with them”
Add a distributed hash table layer for fetching content in a topic on demand? RSS+BitTorrent = hashtags for Lemmy?
It would be federation within federation! The administration overhead would probably be nuts.
Yeah the more I hear counter arguments from people on here, the more I think the best solution is for communities to group together and opt in to cross posting with one another. Are you saying thats a flawed idea too?
I would love to have this! Sometimes the same named group on a different server just doesn’t have as much as another but it’s still different content.
For real! I want to subscribe to suberbowl so I can get football and owls all at once!
But only the superb owls, not the mediocre low-rent fowls.
Yeah exactly. With the example I gave, there’s a good amount of content on each, but none of them is so active that I’d want to follow it alone.
I would like to keep things as they are now and simply add a sign up button next to the instance in the search window. That way they all stay separate but it doesn’t take a lot of extra clicks to get signed up for everything. Or maybe we just have some site hosted by Lemmy devs that crawls for instances based on a keyword search that let’s you sign up from there.
I get that. And definitely simpler. But what if a new community pops up? It sounds tedious to keep checking back in the search engine
Technically a notification could be if a instance using the same name pops up, but that wouldn’t be that simple. I don’t think its that tedious to check the list every once in a while.
As to the design I had an idea. It could be a list of instances using the name and at the top it has a join all button. Then instance has its own join button.
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It doesnt have to be centralized. Just allow power users a function in their Lemmy app of choice to “group” similar communities into one mega community per topic.
Like a frontpage, but just for ONE topic.
And then we could share lists with each other or something.
.oO Trying to remember how this worked on FidoNet.
Sometimes one of them will be just bot posts pulling their content from Reddit or somewhere and it’s kind of annoying, like spam. So sometimes you might want to join one but avoid the other.
The first decade of Reddit’s life it was just pulling content from 4chan and Digg. I would not be surprised to see the fediverse operate similarly.
You’re already seeing Karma farmers on the front page with the reposted piss meme, the north Korean awards memes, uncreative people will attempt to dilute any platform they can find.
Same people that copy your homework and pat themselves on the back or take credit at work for your idea.
Why are some names like yours in big obnoxious blue letters?
You can edit your display name on their website. I like mine 🤷♂️
I mean a lot of the content posted on reddit wasn’t actually made by the posters to begin with. Everybody’s just sharing memes they found on other platforms.
We all came from Reddit, we’ve seen the top of r/all. People should create content instead of “sharing” stuff they “found.” Or get it from obscure places.
I believe they only use one bot, and they all come from the same instance. I already just blocked the bot.
I don’t understand the point of cross-posting from advice subs at all.
I get it if that post from reddit can spark some inferesting discussion between lemmings. What I don’t get is people copying posts from AITA or stuff like that, where the original poster is looking for responses from the comments. I saw one for the LTT subreddit and I’m kinda torn on that, because it can spark some discussion, but its not like LTT is actually going to interact with a bot copy of the subreddit.
You wouldn’t necessarily want this since communities are different depending on the context of the instance it may not be relevant to you. It would be great however to be able to create combos of the communities you subscribe to.
I think a good middle-ground would be if someone could manually create a public community group that combines multiple communities into one, and that other people can subscribe to. That way you can have manual curation and avoid issues with spam, unmoderated communities, and inconsistent names (e.g. /c/catpics vs /c/catphotos)
EDIT: after a few seconds of research, I learned this is what “multi-reddits” are, and people are already asking for it lol
Or maybe the community owners could do it? Seems like a natural extension of federation is for communities to track their counterparts in the federated servers
Yeah there would be plenty of circumstances where you wouldn’t, like politics or local news or something. But I have to imagine there are more circumstances where you do want it. I said this below - what if the community owners grouped themselves with their counterparts, kind of like sub-federations
I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).
Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.
Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.
Just pick the most popular one. The rest will slowly die.
The website UI shows active users, use that metric.
I heard you only see the subscriber count from the own instance, not all together. So there’s no accurate way to tell which one actually is the most popular.
Subscribers yes. Active users no, that’s total.
My instance has just over 100 users.
This is what I see:
Interesting info, thank you.
The website shows active users on your instance, not overall.No, it shows subscribers for your instance, but overall monthly users.
My instance has just over 100 users.
This is what I see:
just like reddit, you search for a subreddit and see all the ones that didnt take and find the one with the most content and subscribe
And that’s how we ended up with subs rulled by really terrible mods but no one ever bothered to help build up an alternative.
This right here is where centralization comes from. People refusing to try smaller communities, gravitating toward the biggest ones, and suddenly you end up beholden to whatever the admins of that place want, because the community is rooted there.
What we need are multi-reddit style systems where you can combine all smaller instances into one feed, instead of only picking the biggest.
yeah that is a good point, I guess I just need to see how it would be implemented. I use https://browse.feddit.de/ to browse for communities and just subscribe to all the ones that relate to a topic, I wouldnt want it to automatically subscribe me to new instances that have the same community because they might do it for trolling or something, maybe the search bar just needs to be improved so we dont have to use outside services to be able to browse all the communities out there
Yeah but nobody wants to split discussions.
These multi-communities. How would they work? They’d have to be curated by the user - which is a dead end since 99% won’t bother. Or else curated by someone else which leads to politicking about who’s listed and who’s not.
And what happens when you go to post? You have to pick one? And worry about who will see it and who won’t? Again, most users would find this burdensome.
Or it could just be like a hashtag and go out into one big conglomerate community. Who hosts that? How is it propagated? How does moderation work?
I think communities curated by a number of people passionate about each subject is just the best way for forums of this nature to work, realistically.
If a community gets too bad, they can and will be fractured and eventually one dies.
Ideal? No. Just what works best.
Multi-communities is a feature we need though. I just don’t think they’re a solution.
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I understand the intent and it’s a valid feature to want, but this just isn’t going to work. How does the app or server know all communities named “whatever” are actually about the same “whatever”? Wouldn’t bad actors just create communities with the same names as anything that became popular? And what about the massive number of duplicate posts every time a story big enough that all the communities post it?
I totally get why someone would want this, but it’s complicated
Easily the most requested feature. I guess we’ll see a solution at one point in the future.
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Yes there was. It was called multi-reddit.
Great feature. Not what OP is asking about.
You had to seek out each subreddit individually to add it to a multi-reddit.
This - I loved multireddit but it wasn’t an autosub. It was just a convenient way to organize your subs once you had them set. If I was feeling too burnt out on the news, I could switch to a multireddit with just cats, hobbies, and food.
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Not exactly what you’re looking for, but kbin’s search functionality can give you a list to find every community with that name that’s federated on their instance:
https://kbin.social/magazines?q=astronomy
While it’s not a one-button solution, it does make subbing much faster. Note that on Kbin, communities are magazines (aka subreddits).
