What is the difference/reason for multiple Fediverse categories

[django@social.coop]

What is the difference/reason for multiple Fediverse categories?

Are they similarly named remote communities?

meta@activitypub.space

[julian@activitypub.space]

Hi django@social.coop! The post didn't make it over to the correct category because I don't think you actually mentioned the group.

Anyhow, the three "fediverse" categories are identically named categories from three separate instances: piefed.social, lemmy.ml, and lemmy.world

They each have various amounts of traction and neither has really won over the others (despite what the inhabitants of each community would like to tell you).

I currently do not have the capability of "nicknaming" a remote category, so they remain identically named, for now. :sweat:

[django@social.coop]

@julian that is a curious issue!

Do they federate with each other?
In the sense that the same post would be sent by them from the same source post, or is it more of a cross-post?

[julian@activitypub.space]

django@social.coop they are all separate communities, and because the threadiverse (as of today) does not have federated cross-posting functionality, all discussions contained therein are separate threads entirely.

[julian@activitypub.space]

django@social.coop oh... but I guess to correctly answer your question, they do federate with one another. They're just separate communities/categories.

[django@social.coop]

@julian gotcha, I imagined maybe a local community then could be subscribe to the remotes and deduplicate posts,, merged threads based on an original post.

[julian@activitypub.space]

django@social.coop yes, that could be one use case, but what I want to stress is that a topic belonging to a category should stay in that category.

For example, if a topic "PieFed is great" is started on fediverse@piefed.social, it wouldn't be right (nor would I really be able to) move that topic to fediverse@lemmy.world — I don't own either of them!

So to de-duplicate topics or move them around based on my personal liking is possible, but goes against the reality that a specific topic is a member of a specific community.

It's more a restriction out of principle than anything.

Now, if one were to put together a proper cross-posting FEP and it were adopted by the threadiverse implementors, then we'd really be cookin'.