this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I have a suggestion about lemmy. Could there be a way where Lemmy can check for community names across instances to help reduce multiple communities of the same name? For example, say someone wants to create a Linux community on their instance and during the creation Lemmy searches an index of community names and finds one already named that name, it would then recommend the existing community which already exists be used or a new community name be made.
My theory is to help reduce the multiple communities of the same name posting the same article numerous times on the all feed.
This is what I think should happen too - having multiple of the "same community" is a feature, but most of the time, I would suspect most people don't want to create another and would rather join the existing one. If they still want to create another, they'll obviously be able to just hit "No, create community" or whatever (for example, politics@sweden and politics@netherlands would understandably be different despite the same name).
Lemmy has no aggressive internet crawling built in. I'm not opposed to someone integrating a global community searcher within lemmy, that uses some external service, as long as its failure safe and can use a regular search when that service goes down.
I would be willing to invest some time into trying to code something that might work. if you would like
Perhaps some kind of "sub-federation" feature allowing communities to automatically share eachother's posts or smthn could be a viable solution?
you wouldn't want to force names to be unique, but offering it as a suggestion, the same way similar posts pop up below when you are creating a post with a similar title/URL, that could be useful!