I still don’t entirely understand how it works here. But I had the thought that if following a spree of making new communities, two ended up quite similar in content and user base, would it then be possible to merge them together?
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No, you can ask one of the communities to effectively shut down and migrate to the other, but I don’t think that is really worthwhile or needed.
To expand on it a little more, I’m not sure why you really want to combine them. I get the idea of thinking of a single source of truth/gathering place, but that’s almost never actually been the case anywhere that I know of, and I think trying to force it will end up not actually serving the community well. I don’t think anyone will suffer for having multiple communities and most people are very okay with cross posting and realizing that articles and the like will be posted in multiple places if they’re interesting.
To be clear I don’t think it’s necessary at the moment, and the pace we are going at seems to be pretty good really. I just posted something into diy and had to stop and check creative to see which fit better, and it occurred to me that it could happen in the future that the overlap is more significant. Thanks for explaining though
I think it’s an understandable desire/concern, especially as that’s how a lot of communities present themselves. But if you think it fits in both I think it’s worth cross posting!
If they are running on different instances, I think it’s a good thing to have duplicate communities. Unlike other sites each instance don’t have piles of money and infrastructure. In the next few months I expect that serval instances of Lemmy will go down and having the redundancies will be a real lifesaver for those communities.
The main developers stated recently new features are unlikely anytime soon due to focus on defect fixes and performance issues.
However, if there is a feature backlog, a community aggregator feature should be a top feature.
At a high level:
- Users shall have the ability to group multiple communities into a single “grouping”
- Users shall have the ability to amend the list of communities within the grouping
- Users shall have the ability to “publish” a grouping to other users
- Users shall have the ability to subscribe to another user’s grouping (this would allow for a type of “editor” like power user that manages a grouping to tailor a desired experience)
This new grouping layer should supercede the larger communities list, but not replace it.
Thoughts?
Makes sense and honestly a much better idea than merging. Allows practically endless specificity without needing to eliminate existing communities
There are pull requests for a sort of super communities, that are basically a view over multiple communities. That would be the only way to merge communities, I think. I don’t see any options on my current 0.17.3 version of Lemmy to move posts from a community to another community, so if you would want to delete a community, all posts will just end up being linked to a deleted community.
