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 !nemmy@lemmy.world
Edit2: Please note that Nemmy is early Alpha, so not really useable as a daily driver yet.
Edit3: Changed Community link to proper format
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.
This would be amazing! Do you have a name for your app yet?
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.
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?
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?
It would be federation within federation! The administration overhead would probably be nuts.
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.
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
Ah… But you’re thinking of the ‘benefit’ of centralization. That one-world model gateways what you can see as much as it enables.
There’s always more your can’t see, and discovery is half the fun. The diversity of approach, content, management, rules and culture are more interesting, to me, than just quantity.
Also it’s very early in adoption of federation. Let’s see how things pan out. And we definitely need to be careful of replicating the past
Everything has Side Effects.
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.
Oooh oooh someone write an aggregator to fetch them into one thread and replies will go to the right destination.
Isotopes
Easily the most requested feature. I guess we’ll see a solution at one point in the future.
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.
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 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.
No, because they are indeed different communities. On reddit there is no way to subscribe to similar communities at once as well.
Yes there was. It was called multi-reddit.
