- cross-posted to:
- blogging@programming.dev
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- blogging@programming.dev
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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I don’t think I would ever be in favor of activity that leads to further centralization. I don’t disagree that fragmentation can make things somewhat confusing for new users, but there are some advantages as well. I like to post to smaller communities for the most part rather than the larger ml and world domains. The responses are more focused on the topic at hand, the communities are usually less hostile and hive-minded, and having all discussions on a just a few big servers leads to a the problem of having all of your eggs in one basket (ie. discussions and accounts disappearing when these servers can’t maintain server costs, the admins move on to other projects, or just poor maintenance practices.) To me it is worth the effort to cross-post and seek out other communities to find interesting content.
Indeed, if these places are able to survive, they’ll survive. No need to force it.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society. Half the reason I’m here is to build. Not consolidate.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society.
This is a brilliant and eloquent observation. My only concern is that younger people (and more specifically younger people from North America, the dominant demographic here and on reddit) never even had a third-place to begin with, so they wouldn’t know what they are missing.
There are multiple communities?! So what?? “Oh my God, I don’t know which one to write!” So what?
This is the type of nerd-sniping “problem” that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.
Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.
No, it’s not always obvious which is the “main” community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.
It’s not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It’s social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can’t feel it because it doesn’t directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.
I’d also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy’s github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.
Everyone convincing each other in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner.
So when people vote according to what you prefer, it’s validation of the problem. When they don’t, it’s “insanely toxic and dismissive”. Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?
Who gives a shit about user experience anyways?
This is a type of “faster horse” case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in “centralized system” mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.
there are many communities that died due to lack of traction.
Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.
To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.
Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn’t enough people interested.
What would help is that people stopped trying to find a “canonical place” to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it’s been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.
What would help is that people stopped trying to find a “canonical place” to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it’s been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.
Today I learned about this community, seems interesting
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Go for the most active one
There isn’t one “most active one” because federation isn’t perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.
The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
You can’t guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.
I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they’re inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn’t decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.
federation isn’t perfect
Again: so what? It’s reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.
You can’t guarantee that.
You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn’t bother me, and I truly don’t understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.
Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn’t decentralized.
Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls “Thinking in Words”. If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it’s easy to coordinate a move away.
It’s a huge problem with the platform which you choose to ignore by saying “so what”. It’s impossible to refute someone who digs in their heels and says “so what” to everything and not seeing the problem.
There is a difference between “not seeing the problem” and “asking yourself what are the implications of it”. I’m running 15+ instances and I’m running a website that is devoted to help people find the “canonical” community in the fediverse. I can point to dozens of other issues that are a lot more “painful” to me as an user and an instance admin, none of them are related with the “pain of having to choose which community to join or focus”.
I’m again going to ask: is there any actual, practical example of this being such a “huge issue”?
And yet people want a better solution and are asking for it. And the only response you, an owned of 15+ instances, and an admin of a website that helps people find instances, can make is “deal with it it’s meant to be hard”. It’s a huge usability problem, it’s funny that you don’t see it. Consider this my last reply to you.
You repeated the accusation of “not seeing it”, misinterpreted what I am saying as “deal with it, it’s meant to be hard” when I am actually saying the exact opposite (It does not require a lot of work to figure out “organically” and it is not hard to workaround the issue) and when asked repeatedly for actual instances of this being “a huge usability issue”, you run away with some pretentious posturing. That’s just lame.
It’s the Linux mindset, the pain is the point.
Yeah I have seen this plenty in open source. It’s like people don’t want other people to use their software, or they forget a regular user isn’t tech savy and they just want to talk about their hobby, not look around in 50 places seeing where to post.
Bruh we just don’t do the addiction painkillers of corporate. Doesn’t mean at all that the pain is the point.
If the system does not depend on a central authority
In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.
it’s easy to coordinate a move away.
It’s not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven’t seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.
That doesn’t bother me, and I truly don’t understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.
Cool. It doesn’t bother you. Then just keep doing what you’re doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won’t care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don’t care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?
This isn’t about maximizing reach of our posts. It’s about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.
It’s about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase
Great, so let’s talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.
But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.
There is no point
Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There’s no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.
But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities.
Why? That’s a pretty big assumption to think a significant share of people will default to create a new community, when the most likely scenario is that they will browse around their own instance to find out what is already here.
Even in the most extreme cases, we have 4-5 “repeated” communities and they all eventually consolidated into one.
There isn’t one “most active one” because federation isn’t perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.
Number of users is pretty similar in my experience, with an average difference between 2 and 10 users.
Cool. I’m glad you’re getting a fairly smooth experience, but that hasn’t been my experience or others’. I’ve seen posts with only a few comments but on their home server they have whole comment trees that I didn’t see. Vote counts can be around 10-20 on one server and greater than 100 on another.
The few last weeks were rough because of the 19.1 mess.
Federation should be working smoothly from now on.
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Why can you never make your point without being combative and off-putting? I’ve seen you do this many times. I communicate with very helpful and enthusiastic people who have blocked you or warn others from engaging with you because of your abrasive comments.
Too much time living in Germany, sorry. ;)
Seriously, though… Look at the submission:
- it starts with a coward’s version of an imperative (“needs to fix”) in the title. Look around and you will see plenty of cases of people using this phrasing when they want to give an ultimatum but don’t have the means/authority to back it up with a credible threat.
- It goes on to describe the “problem” but stays in the abstract, without ever giving a real example of its consequences or why it should be so important. IOW, it wants to get other people to worry about something that haven’t affected them in a meaningful way.
- The most annoying thing of all: the author sees a problem, describes all of the possible solutions, but stays away from showing work done on any of them.
I have all the patience in the world when someone starts an argument from the position of a learner, trying to understand the situation and willing to accept that they are the ones that need to adapt to something new. But when someone starts arguing already from the position of unearned authority (like the title) and wants to turn “their” problem into other people’s work, then yes I will respond in this abrasive way.
You don’t think there’s anything on your end that can be improved? You don’t think you can do better?
Always, but how is this related to the discussion at hand?
Do you think that if my responses were more tactful, OP would change his mind or at least give some thought about their own (passive-)aggressiveness on the post?
Without a doubt in my mind, yes. You would have that effect on the OP. But not just OP, everyone else reading as well.
If that is true, then why hasn’t OP responded well to the other more tactful responses?
I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.
Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that’s fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that’s okay.
I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:
I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.
Id say that the obvious answer is the Linux community with the most members. !linux@lemmy.ml has more than double the number of subscribers of the next most active Linux community.
But then you’re on .ml
.ml is okay to discuss Linux, the overlap between the two communities makes sense
The overlap between authoritarians and Linux?
Well I suppose North Korea does run the closed source RedStarOS.
I meant hardcore leftists
Oh like me?
Yeah we do overlap with Linux, the tankies however don’t.
what makes you think they are authoritarian?
Because we all know how tankies are, so stop acting coy.
Maybe you should go conquer some bread instead of trying to defend maoists and stalinists.
You don’t need an account on lemmy.ml to subscribe to any community there. For example, I run my own self-hosted instance and none of the communities I’m subscribed to are from my own instance.
Oh I meant more that you’re interacting with them.
And you’ll eventually get banned from it for not praising Stalin hard enough
Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about what they are saying.
Literally spoken as a leftist who has gotten bans for not being a Maoist bootlicker. My accounts with this name across multiple instances are the on a short leash for daring to question ML dogma.
If you don’t insert politics into normal conversations and you value relationships more than you value being right (left) then this should not be an issue.
Stay away from the political communities and don’t feel like you need to correct people when they spout out political bullshit.
But I want to discuss politics and worldnews. I’m just not allowed, because wrongthink.
Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation
It makes me feel like I should be making the post to multiple communities, but then I feel like I’m spamming
It does kinda suck being defederated from big instances like lemmy.ml because there are big communities there, but at the other end it’s nice to have alternatives on different instances. For example, I can’t view !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml but I can access !programmer_humor@programming.dev.
The PDev version is better anyway.
I have a few communities that are still on .ml, I forgot you guys were defederated, maybe I should move them elsewhere
Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation
Hopefully defederation will happen less and less with 19.X allowing users to block instances themselves
Yeah I think there needs to be more options though, for admins and for users. Like conditional caching or proxying of images from other instances.
And not just blocking instances but choosing to block all the users from an instance without blocking their communities, or only blocking their comments not their posts. Also admins should be able to set default blocks that all the users get but can change individually
That would be nice indeed, but with the development rhythm, it might take a while to get there. Sublinks on the other hands seems promising sublinks.org
In this case, it’s the first, which is obvious based on the number of subscribers and active users. You don’t even need a third party tool, it’s literally in the sidebar
It happens! I moderate !hockey@lemmy.ca, and recently !hockey@lemmy.world merged with us naturally.
, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
[citation needed]
I don’t see any community that has been mechanically, forcibly moved over to another instance. I can still post to !cats@a.net and !cats@b.xyz separately.
Cooking communities merged:
That’s what I meant with natural merging of communities
That’s good to see, but still doesn’t cover the case of what happens if those communities are in different instances. That’s the really big issue with merging (naturally or not).
!unixporn@lemmy.ml is the reference. !unixporn@lemmy.world still exists, but has much less activity. There was some backlash at the time about the subreddit mods wanting to take over the .lw community, so everybody fled to .ml
I’ve already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it’s good that the badness of that “solution” is acknowledged.
As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that’s what webrings are for! Let’s bring them back from the '90s. Basically get’s give the power of “static search” back to the users.
Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I’m wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I’m mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.
The third solution wouldn’t cause extra communication. If you’re subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That’s the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.
If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.
I’m assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn’t explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn’t mean you can’t maintain similar communities without merging them.
If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.
Oh that’s a very good point! I had the wrong impression there was extra data sharing needed in this case but yeah, looking back it makes sense that the amount of data transfer is about the same considering the focus is on the verb (actor A sends to / pulls from actor B) rather on who is doing the action.
I just wish threads using the same link and threads that are crossposted shared comments with a link on top of the comment that said the title of the original post.
It sucks when an article is posted to 5 communities and i have to go to each one to read all the comments. I want to read all the comments about the article in one place. If the thread is about something specific and uses the same link I would still understand the context because the comment would include the link/title of the original thread it was posted to.
That’s exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.
Why couldn’t this be solved at the client level? Whenever you go to a thread, the client could check the submission URL and inline comments from matching posts from other subscribed communities.
Reddit already does that with their “related diacussions” tab. It would be a lot more elegant, requires no extensions in the spec, no changes in the server side and easily prototyped/tested.
requires no extensions in the spec
That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.
no changes in the server side
But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.
easily prototyped/tested
Every fediverse platform already supports following
Actors. That’s part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client.
Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior. There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?
One is not inherently better than the other.
When it comes to decentralized technologies and systems, it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the leaf nodes as much as possible. The less things are mandated on the server, the easier it is to build a robust system. Pushing as much functionality as possible to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.
Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior
Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don’t have to send a follow request and the other community doesn’t have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It’s all optional.
There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?
There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.
it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible… Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.
The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.
The proposal would allow one community to follow another
Who determines when a community should follow another? The admin? The user?
If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented,
My point is that it a lot easier to implement something that solves the problem that you are describing than asking for a whole change in the implementation of the server.
The nodes are the servers not the clients. (…) The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (…) is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.
It’s a trade-off between speed to deliver the base case vs the lack of flexibility to deliver a more flexible version of it. And the more that we push to the server, the slower it will be to be able to extend it. Case in point: People have been complaining about the lack of algoritmic timelines on Mastodon. The Mastodon developers will find all sorts of excuses to not have to implement it… “Algorithms are bad for people”, “People are just too used with how things in Big Tech”, “we rather working on moderation and safety”… etc. All of those are bad rationalizations for them to avoid doing work they don’t want to do. Which is fine, the devs are not forced to develop anything. The interesting things is that this problem was solved a lot faster by flipping it around and pushing to the client. And it works so well that that people now can even choose what type of algorithm they want to run.
Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says.
It’s not a problem. It’s a great feature. Because there’s more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you’re free to do so. But I’m also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.
It’s always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they’re brainless and they just think of Lemmy as “the new Reddit” (or Mastodon as “the new Twitter”).
Freedom! Freedom to crosspost between 20 identical communities!
If they were identical they wouldn’t be separated. Everyone seems to fail to understand that the same « topic » doesn’t make automatically the same « community ». The goals and rules of instances are different.
I 100% agree that what you suggest could be a valid usecase. However, from my subjective point of view, people are not using it that way. Let me present an example.
There are 12 communities dedicated to Bitcoin in general. I can’t imagine 12 different points of view to discuss this topic from. Lemmy.ml somehow has 3, but 2 of them are completely empty.
All of these are mere duplicates of each other. Let’s put the technical difficulties aside, and imagine we have a global namespace, and each instance just has it’s own mod team to which users would auto-subscribe (with an option to opt-out, or use a different list). Now we have more users seeing each other and being able to react to each other. Sure, that would put more strain on the individual mod teams, but, there could be a system in place to make it easier for them to cooperate. Two or more mod teams flagged a comment? Let’s auto-suggest it for the review to the rest.
TLDR; More users, more mods, more fruitful discussion.
Then, there are more niche communities. 1 dedicated just to the lightning network, 1 dedicated just to the markets, 1 probably dedicated to trolling and memes, 1 dedicated to bitcoin from the point of view of the united kingdom.
All of these indicate their nature by the name.
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Goes to show that bitcoin bros like to spam around!
Jokes aaide: I think you don’t quite get the point. The issue is not “are there enough mods?” but really “what moderation rules do you want to enforce?”. You can’t force collaboration on instances that have different views and rules on moderation because they will disagree on key elements. Some instances are very open to all kind of content, even offensive, and will enforce close-to-no moderation; others will have a very active moderation to protect their users against hate speech, for instance. You don’t solve anything by thinking those can work together. There are separate instances for a good reason, and it’s ought to stay like that.
You can’t force collaboration
You can. There’s always the lowest common denominator. If there’s a guy peddling viagra pills in the astronomy community, it’s clearly offtopic. Most mods would flag the post regardless of their political or ideological affiliation. That takes care of the obvious spam.
- cooperation = advantage
- noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage
instances that have different views and rules on moderation
And that’s ok. They will do as they always did. Hide posts, or users that violates their terms of service
- cooperation = advantage
- noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage
Additionally, you could even automate certain decisions. Let’s say you are a pro-monarchy activist instance, and there is a post with title “Digest the aristocracy”, containing pictures of peasants playing football with the king’s head.
You could’ve easily set the following rule: if mods from both hermajesty.co.uk and puppiesandkittens.org flags the post, AND freedomforpeasants.com does not, auto-flag the post here as well.
In this scenario, even the “enemy” instance is making it easier for you to make the decision.
“You can force cooperation”. Wow. A true fighter for free software, you are. Sure, let’s use that as a new catchphrase.
(But if it was to be actually enforced on any actually decentralized network — a concept that you still have a hard time understanding, apparently — there would be forks up the ass from such an autoritative move. Just go on Reddit, that’s what you’re looking for.)
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To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.
I will never understand why people keep bringing this up as a problem, when the same thing happens on reddit, and no one ever cared.
Reddit has a large enough userbase that duplicate communities can each reach a sustainable size without interfering. The fediverse userbase isn’t large enough to sustain even a single community for some topics, let alone duplicates. I’m in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn’t a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.
Also, reddit is a centralized system. A decentralized system is going to have problems that a centralized one doesn’t
I’m in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn’t a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.
Any examples of those? What prevents those communities from merging?
I saw one recently in a linux community where a user complained about multiple “I ditched Windows” posts. I’ve seen requests for stickies in some gardening communities.
I assume nothing actively prevents the communities from merging other than the mods being comfortable running their communities. But they shouldn’t have to merge. We can have solutions that enable multiple communities to exist while also preventing rampant crossposting and post duplication.
I saw one recently in a linux community where a user complained about multiple “I ditched Windows” posts. I’ve seen requests for stickies in some gardening communities.
That’s something that the moderators need to take action on, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, unmoderated communities is a whole issue on its own, but it doesn’t seem linked to the community separation.
But they shouldn’t have to merge.
They don’t have to, they can. But them being unwilling to merge similar communities seems strange, except if they can’t agree on instance due to the instance politics.
Cooking communities did a few months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/7578470
As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a ‘problem’? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.
People are pushing for it because they see the amount of people here as a finite number that shouldn’t be spread too thin.
I’m more on the side advocating to get more people here so that we don’t worry about how many communities we have on the same topic
I completely agree. Having multiple communities is just the way to keep things democratic.
Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it?
That would be pretty great, tbh. But what many demand is more like cross platform multi-player than this.
If I play Overwatch, I want to be matched with other people playing Overwatch. I don’t care what network or platform they use to access the game.
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I disagree and think it’s fine how it is. I suppose if two want to link that would be fine but you might as well shut one down and move everyone over. People will always flock to whatever’s the more popular one. This could also flip with a competing community with better ideals/moderation/thoughts for engagement. I don’t see how lumping them all together really helps anything.
This definitely isn’t the biggest issue.
I think it’s fine if multiple of the “same” community exist.
If I were on Snooface and wanted to share/discuss a new game would I do it on, r/Gaming, r/Games, or r/TrueGaming? (Or yet another.)
If two communities are EXACTLY the same, then sure, merge them, but they are never EXACTLY the same.
Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities
They are already implemented on /kbin - as Collections
Huh, maybe I should switch to kbin/mbin then
I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don’t see an issue with duplicate communities.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366
I hope they can revisit the idea. There are many cases of duplicate communities splintering the community, making finding content more difficult.
Do you have an example? Because all the evidence shows that people want to be seen when they post, and will naturally gravitate towards the most active communities, except if they are against the instance the most active community is.
Because all the evidence shows…
What evidence shows that? This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.
You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I’m subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn’t happen.
What evidence shows that?
The merge of the cooking communities I shared with you in another comment: https://lemmy.world/post/7578470
This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.
- fediverse.world: 104 comments
- fediverse.ml: 7 comments
Didn’t find it in https://kbin.social/m/fediverse nor in any other community except lemmy.ml (2 comments)
Don’t you think that we pretty much consolidated around fediverse.world?
For Linux, the main one is !linux@lemmy.ml.
For movies, the most active is !moviesandtv@lemm.ee, there is also !movies@lemmy.world, but it’s getting less and less active, so we’ll probably consolidate around the first one soon.
Gaming is an interesting choice, there are a few of them, but each have their reasons of existing
- !gaming@lemmy.world is for people who like LW
- !games@sh.itjust.works is for people who prefer to stay away from LW
- !gaming@beehaw.org like the slower and more moderated aspect of beehaw.
There are others, but the interesting aspect is in this case, every community has enough people to stay active.
I don’t think we’ve consolidated around fediverse@lemmy.world. You’re using a single post as an example. I’ve posted links that got 40+ comments in fediverse@kbin.social but way less in other communities. I’ve posted or seen threads in fediverse@lemmy.ml that got more discussion.
The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn’t sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I’d bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to cooking@lemmy.world anyway.
What I’m talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren’t necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They’ll see communities they’re interested in and sub, but then won’t see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.
Even if consolidation is happening, there’s a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find movies@a.com or movies@b.com but if they’re grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.
If you want an example of community consolidation between different servers, there is !unixporn@lemmy.ml and !unixporn@lemmy.world. Most of the activity if happening on lemmy.ml, and there was a backlash when the mods from the sub wanted to takeover the lemmy.world community. Both are still open, but someone who wants to post would see that the LW isn’t as active as the .ml, and post to the latter.
About your point, there are two things at hand.
First, the technical possibility of it happening. It has been linked elsewhere, the Lemmy devs are not interested in this. Kbin has it, somehow, but the userbase is now on Lemmy, and I don’t see it moving the Kbin/Mbin, except if they surpass Lemmy in features. Maybe sublinks will have this, we’ll see.
But beyond the technical aspect, there is also the “political” aspect. People who don’t like communities on LW are not going to enjoy being forced to have their content shared to LW communities too. People who avoid Lemmy.ml due to the political stance of the users are also not going to be happy to discuss with the people they are trying to avoid.
The point is that Lemmy has been around for some months now, people know each others, the other servers, and more or less where everyone stands. If people keep communities separated, there is a reason, and it’s not going to be solved by technical measures.
the Lemmy devs are not interested in this
I know. I’m the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn’t it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.
there is also the “political” aspect
Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.
Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.
Your arguments against it seem to be:
- Its not needed. - I’ve pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn’t happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don’t have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don’t know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you’ve centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
- People might not want it - The proposal doesn’t force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities’ members.
I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that. Either the communities you’re in don’t join up with others or they do and you wouldn’t notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)
No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.
You didn’t read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I’m not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that needing your comments mirrored perfectly everywhere in every community comes off as a bit:
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Obsessive / Compulsive
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Narcissistic
I don’t need to be involved in every conversation about the subjects I’m interested in, and I don’t need everyone in every community to see what I have to say, and having problems with things not being that way, well… It just comes off as very weirdly self-focused.
I mean, this is no different than reddit having millions of subreddits and having multiple posts of the same article in many different ones, with many different conversations.
Also, didn’t we learn any lessons from Reddit? Like making each community as big as possible means the community becomes less of a community and more of a chore? It’s asking for Eternal September to happen more quickly, by shoving everyone in the same box as fast as possible.
The fact that there’s a bunch of splintered, smaller communities is actually what I like about Lemmy.
All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.
Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.
Obsessive and narcissistic because there are many duplicate communities and it’s frustrating to try and find out which ones to use? Okay…
All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.
Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.
It just sounds like you didn’t read the post and made up a narrative in your head about what it’s about.
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I think the multi-Reddit approach as the default would work best. Users subscribe to a “central” Group or Topic and immediately pull content from every federated community that self-designates as such.
One problem with this is if the community changes their mind and turns into something else. Either they check a box and designate under another Group or Topic, or get unsubscribed by users manually.
A lot of communities fracture due to bad mods.
Grouping them all together kinda undoes that and become a clusterfuck.
Grouping them wouldn’t mean merging them. For a lack of better terms a Group (multi-Reddit) would allow each indexed community to retain its independence.
But I do see your point about bad mods. Leaving a rotten community in the index has the potential of making the group look bad. However, that’s where the beauty of federation comes into play where users can unsubscribe from those undesirable communities from the larger group.
For a lack of better terms a Group […] would allow each indexed community to retain its independence
Affiliations? We’ve had those since the 90s, every fandom forum had its dedicated section for affiliates.
The people thinking solutions for these fediverse problems really need to sit back and look at the internet of the 80s and 90s. Webrings, affiliations, gopher, fanlistings, FTP, much of the problems we “seem” to have were already solved long ago.
The same topic communities should merge under the same page unless the mods don’t want it.
