I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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.
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
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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What about the (non) fictitious problem when you have several (similar) communities dedicated to the same topic on the same instance? What then?
Same solutions apply. They don’t have to be across different instances to be able to group them somehow.
I honestly don’t see a reason why anybody would want something like that
Famous last words.
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”).
To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.
Freedom! Freedom to crosspost between 20 identical communities!
Freedom to have any opinion that is exactly like mine.
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.
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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
“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.)
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.
I personally don’t think this is a huge issue, but it is an issue. I usually pick the biggest community on a topic, or if there are multiple that are fairly active, subscribe to both/all. The only real complaint I have about it is that users will often make the same post to both communities, so I see duplicate posts on my timeline and the discussion is split in half.
I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances, in a way that they would appear as a single community to users. I don’t know how that would be implemented though.
I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances,
If they are willing to cooperate that far, they could as well merge the communities
And then the users who were in the moved-from server but are defederated from the moved-to server get automatically banne d/ blocked from it.
Thanks but no thanks. Sharing is the solution, not merging. Merging is the solution that corporate sells for every problem.
That’s true. I guess I like the idea of being able to distribute a community across servers, but it may be more trouble than it’s worth to implement.
I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.
Lw is still on the previous lemmy version. I hope they’ll upgrade soon
Just waiting for thing to stabilize on 0.19.X for a week or two. If 0.19.3 proves stable, then we will move 🤞
Should be fixed by now with version 19.2 and 19.3
That’s probably to do with the federation issues that cropped up with the new Lemmy version at Christmas.
Honestly the Lemmy main devs just aren’t that great amd their hardline ideology pushes away plenty of potential help.
Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities
They are already implemented on /kbin - as Collections
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.
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?
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.
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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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.
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.
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
I think the biggest issue for me with your proposal is any time a single pancake post is made, four communities now show recent activity and are likely to all show on everyone’s main feed.
Ideally only one post would be made, no crossposts. One pancake post would be on your feed, and that same post would be visible from other communities
Ahh, I think I got you. So, ideally, ‘followed’ content wouldn’t trigger recent activity within the ‘followers’ community? Is that the idea?
Followed posts would just link to the original post and wouldn’t be a crosspost, yeah. So assuming
aandbare following each other, a post fromawould show up inb. If someone inbclicks on the post, they would just open the same post froma.WHat if they’re defederated from
abut not fromb?
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.
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.
It happens! I moderate !hockey@lemmy.ca, and recently !hockey@lemmy.world merged with us naturally.
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.
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
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.
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.
But then you’re on .ml
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.
.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.
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
, 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
