Just starting to familiarize myself with everything after about a decade at reddit. I understand that you can view content across instances but I’m noticing that both kbin and lemmy have similar (competing?) magazines/communities.
For example @PCGaming and !pcgaming (lemmyworld) but then there is also, @pcgaming, !pcgaming@lemmy.ca, etc.
Do I have to subscribe to all of them? Or are there “official” fediverse communities?
As I said, I’m still trying to figure things out, but subscribing to so many similar communities seems cumbersome for the user and (imo) fragments userbases that are literally talking about the same thing.
Thanks in advance!
I’m subscribing to all and I’ll just unsubscribe if it turns out I don’t like them. For overlapping ones I haven’t seen many duplicate threads. If I post, though, I’ll stick to one and right now I’m favoring the one on my instance.
This is a good tactic!
I created /m/BestOf on kbin to kind of avoid having multiple instances of all. I wonder why other communities don’t try to represent all of the Fediverse instead of just their instances…?
Because people aren’t used to the idea of the fediverse and are ultimately treating their instance as a monolithic entity, when that’s not the case.
I actually like the idea of duplicate communities, because well… Let’s say you want to talk Sherlock Holmes.
Well, some people don’t want to discuss BBC Sherlock. Others don’t want to discuss whether or not he’s queer. And some want to discuss neither.
So to accommodate everyone, you WILL need 3 communities anyway. They may as well be on separate instances, so that if one goes down or isn’t very active you can at least discuss the stuff that’s allowed there.
So the whole community is fragmented, why not make an entire different post ?
You kind of have to think of this differently than you would on reddit. The fragmentation is to an extent the point. Maybe you talked about pcgaming on Reddit, 2 or 3 discords, 4chan, and Steam communities in your daily life already. If you miss out on a conversation in one place, that’s unfortunate but not the end of the world. If its big enough news you’ll see it in another community too.
Here you can talk about gaming in Kbin, Lemmy, Mastadon, Pixelfed etc. As your explore and your network grows, you’ll get it all, possibly in the same feed. And possibly you don’t care for the kbin pcgaming, you unsubscribe from it and perhaps a big strong community forms on Lemmy.world and thats where everyone goes but you’re not subscribed? Someone will boost it your way eventually and you’ll discover it too.
Curating your own feed takes some time and effort. But the beauty of it that it’ll be fully yours.
On reddit I’ve always used my Frontpage which consisted only of my subbed subs. At the beginning I went through r/All for a few hours and subscribed to everything that interested me. Then after a few days I’ve switched to my Frontpage and never looked back. After that I discovered new subreddits through comments. I had several hundred subs at the end.
For now since it’s all new to me - I’m just subscribing to all the overlapping communities/ magazines that interest me that i stumble across. I can easily scroll past duplicates. But eventually things will shake out to preferences in community vibe and I can prune back then.
You don’t have to subscribe to all of them, just subscribe to the ones that give you the vibe you like.
There’s no such thing as “official” communities, because every instance could potentially be the next big thing, and every instance could potentially disappear tomorrow. That’s sort of annoying for people who just want one good community, but it’s one of the strengths of the fediverse. Some people will really like one instance and some people will hate it. Unlike with reddit where there’s only one /r/books, there’s as many as we have instances and people can go where they like and avoid where they hate.
I do think that if Redditors (like me) arrive in waves and continue to set the tone, we will see pressure on front-end developers to figure out a way to conflate identically named communities in the end-user UI. It would take federation in a slightly different direction than expected, but it provides resiliency in its own way. For instance if a large instance supplies 50% of the “tech” articles and defederates or collapses, users still get 50% of the experience with no additional effort. I’m sure there are knock-on effects I’m ignoring, though.
I could imagine something similar to reddit’s multisubreddit feature, whereas in this case it’s different magazines/communities from different instances or even services.
I think a possible way forward for this that won’t necessarily affect federation directly is to allow a user to combine different subscriptions into a custom “list” or custom “magazine”/“community”. Then on the user end, it looks like 1 combined feed, but in the back end, it’s still just a bunch of federated communities.
Yeah, I don’t think any changes to the back-end or to Activitypub would be needed. If something were to come around, I think it would be on the UI side, an app or a change to the web front-end of kbin or lemmy that allows custom “multireddits,” or simple collapse of identically named comms/mags. I would even say it should be an option, not a standard behavior.
You don’t have to do anything. You can subscribe to as many or as few of them as you want. Yeah - it’s a bit cumbersome, but the functionality already exists to search for a community name (like “pcgaming”) and get links to all of the communities with that name from all of the federated instances, and then you can just run down the list and click on the link on each one to subscribe to it, and you’re done.
When you open your subscription feed, you’ll get the posts from all of them, and in fact you’ll have to look at the url on a specific one to even know which specific instance it’s on, since they’ll all look and act the same on your feed.
And no - there aren’t any “official” communities, and that’s by design, and actually a lot of the point. When there are single, monolithic communities and they go bad, the users often have no recourse. That’s when, on Reddit someone would go off and start a new sub and try to draw posters over there.
But here, the damage that assholes and idiots can do is limited by the fact that the content is already spread over multiple communities, and you can avoid the bad ones just by unsubscribing or blocking them, and all the rest of the content will still be there on your feed.
Like others have said you can subscribe to as many or as few as you like. Personally, I’m subscribed to multiple “duplicate” communities. It’s not really been a problem out of some rare instances, like when one of the Reddit third-party apps announced they were moving to Lemmy.
You can subscribe to all of them if you wish, you can subscribe to only one if you wish. One of the communities might have more members, another community’s members might be friendlier or more appealing to you.
You have the choice.
I think there’s a threshold fedi would hit and we’d start seeing these duplicates diminish. Not all of them will go away, that’s always going to be a part of a federated network of servers each with their own user base. But some big ones will come to dominate and naturally acquire most or all of the available audience. You can’t federate human behavior, but this system does allow for much better migration and diversity between groups than a singular aggregate like reddit. We don’t need to make news and TrueNews. There’s no monopoly on such terms. You can just make your own news somewhere and promote it and run it your way.
But right now, this place is in an embryonic stage. Cells are forming, dividing, dying, and being born. I would expect the landscape of it to change given enough freedom to grow. The more users we acquire, the more these magazines will evolve and change to accommodate. I expect some of these duplicates are going to go their own way or die off or be replaced. It’s gonna be interesting to see how it shakes out.
Of the gaming communities you’ve explored so far, which one(s) seem best?
I found there’s generally no issue in just subscribing to a lot of magazines, all the content curates itself in the main feed and I’m not seeing too many distress duplicates cross instance
