Seeing a big “politics” community in both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world just confuses me as to which I should be subscribing to and I don’t really want to subscribe to both.
Guess this is just a downside of federated instances? There’ll never just be one “/r/politics” on Lemmy?
I’d like to point out what just happened to [email protected].
It was closed and migrated to another instance explicitly to keep things from being “spread out”.
It also happens that the instance it was moved to has extremely overbearing moderation that effectively prevents actual discussion. It’s so “curated” that everything is segregated into hyper specific feeds, everything except “official” news is removed, and no one is contributing because of the overbearing rules (no questions, no memes, no “rants” i.e. don’t make opinion posts).
It’s controlled by the “experienced” moderation team from /r/Android, that subreddit that would get like one or two posts a day that weren’t removed. It was strangled. We are supposed to defer to it this “experienced” team, hence why the lemmy.world instance has been locked. Now that instance sits pretty as having thousands of subscribers, and that will hurt the growth of smaller android groups because people gravitate towards the biggest ones and the second biggest one on lemmy.world is locked.
In essence, forced centralization. This is exactly what federation was supposed to prevent. Subverted in less than a two weeks since those communities formed.
I think in that case the “forced” centralisation is purely constructed. There are no mechanisms preventing somebody from creating an android community in their own instance and federating it with lemmy.world. Even if [email protected] is permanently locked, that fact isn’t really a barrier to entry for another android community to pop up, just that that community was able to establish a subscriber base over time but I don’t see why another android community couldn’t do the same given some time, especially if the available android communities at the moment are locked and restricted.
Imo admins should not allow the lockdown of a community on one instance in favor of the one on another. It’s fine if the original mod wants to switch, but then just get someone else to mod the community or close it down until someone decides to claim it again.
The upside of this is that if you don’t like how a particular community is being moderated, you can follow a different community about the same topic
Honestly, I can see why some people find it annoying but in my experience so far it’s been fine. Do a sweep on lemmyverse, sub to all the communities around a given topic, never really think about which one it actually came from when I see a post in my feed.
There are some quite niche topics that have been unnecessarily split, essentially just because people want to be in charge rather than joining forces, but that’s people for you and railing about it isn’t gonna get us anywhere. From an end-user pov, subscribing to multiple has been fine.
This is why the decentralized approach is great. If mods get their heads too power swollen, one can form their own community and even on their own server if they wish. The approach lessens the potential for abuse.
Totally agree - it’s a wonderful freedom, but it also means as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected and there isn’t a policy to transfer or reclaim the space if it is locked by the one person who owns it. Not a huge issue now, but come the point large companies are moving to the space it could well get quite messy!
as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected
What’s this about?
TMW you realize there’s no downside to joining multiple communities for the same topic, even if they have the same name.
Imo there is, but it’s solvable. Personally, I almost always browse specific communities/subs and almost never scroll through my home feed. So multiple communities is annoying because it means jumping between each one on the list. Could be solved though, by just implementing a Lemmy equivalent to multireddits.
It’s probably the number one feature request so if it doesn’t get put into the core Lemmy UI it’ll almost certainly be implemented by third party apps soon enough. Will definitely be useful, and fun for people like me who enjoy organising things into lists!
From a different end-user POV, seeing the same stuff repeated is not fun. I would prefer to see everything once instead of choosing between seeing almost everything twice(subscribed to both) or missing a little bit(subscribed to one, blocked the other).
Oh that’s interesting, I wonder why I’ve not been seeing repeated posts. Maybe a setting somewhere, or a version difference, or we use different interfaces or whatever. Yeah I can definitely see how that would be annoying!
I strongly prefer it.
It’s a much more organic reflection of older systems. It used to be that there were local newspapers, national ones, and international ones. I want the same thing with my memes. I want a place I go to see what the hot movies and games across the world, and another where discussions are mostly people in my geography or who share a common set of tastes with me.
This idea that the internet should flatten the world into one monoculture has been, in my opinion, both naive and destructive to a lot of tastes that don’t align with the dominant tastemakers.
When I look at the many communities with the same names, I completely stops me from interacting with them. Most of the time I know they’re going to be copies of each other with a bunch of duplicate content reposted to infinity.
I think your example is interesting but i disagree with your assertion that it some how facilitates finding niche content.
For example it would be difficult to have to explicitly know that
obscure-instance.xyz/c/gameshosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands andprogramming.dev/c/gamesis actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nlandgame_designoffer a significantly better user experience. If we want to make the fediverse feel accessible to people, it has to be easy to find what you’re looking for.This whole thing feels like crypto where everyone has their own coin and they only kind of work together if you have some kind of exchange and some people accept Bitcoin and not Doge. It’s just too complicated for non technical people.
First, if it helps, redundant communities will solve themselves. We’re in a period where people are trying stuff out, but if one group is just a weaker duplicate of another, everyone will eventually just coalesce around the slightly better version.
As for the general complaint, I can see your rationale. But I think a better analogy instead of cryptocoins – which were all essentially useless ponzi schemes and ego projects – would be bars.
In theory, you don’t need two (or more!) sports bars on the same block. But there’s a reason they stay in business instead of one owner just expanding to serve twice as many customers. They have different vibes based on different people. One might dig soccer more, or have a better selection of craft brews. Even though they’re superficially similar, if you ask your friend, “Hey, do you want to go to X?” It’s not at all weird for them to say, “Eh… let’s to Y. if you want, we can stop by X later.”
You know what I mean?
The bar analogy is interesting but is missing the most important factor: All of the bars have the same name. The only difference is where they are located. Now I have to go to each one because I have no idea if they’re a soccer themed bar or a karaoke bar.
Even if the redundant communities somehow solve themselves (which I doubt), there will forever be an abandoned community polluting the search results because no one is going to delete it.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that [email protected] are gonna be lefty memes, and the memes at [email protected] will be generic, and so on.
There are some where it’s less distinct. [email protected] and [email protected] are not so easily differentiated, but at the moment they have totally different content on their frontpages, so I have no complaints. Over time, I expect both to evolve, most likely in different ways.
I think the search problem will get resolved over time. Currently, search is very rudimentary, and barely useful for finding new communities. As it becomes better and cataloging communities it can also become better at downranking or excluding communities below a certain activity level.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that [email protected] are gonna be lefty memes
Lol. I can only assume it’s a massive joke and I’m just not in on it. [email protected] in no way means “lefty memes”. It only proves my point
Well… are you subscribed to [email protected]?
I don’t expect you to know that Gerry’s Bar and Grill is a gay bar or that Fanatics is a Packers bar by their name. You find out by going there.
A good thing to note is that both of those bars you mentioned have different names. That makes it easier to know which to go to, once I figure out which is which.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Why not subscribe to them all? Content will still appear on your home feed …
There were a bunch of subreddits I was subbed to on Reddit that were effectively the same thing, even if they had different names.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
Once this lands it’ll be all the positives and none of the downsides, so, meh.
That will be as useless as multireddit The only option is to make the default all agglomeration of all communities of the same name on all instances. And then you block the ones you don’t like
That is inherent with the decentralized nature of instances. Hopefully with all the new dev attention we’ll get community grouping and account linking to make it a bit another. But if you don’t like the power consolidation from centralized systems this is the solution, warts and all.
I’m curious, what’s your concern with subscribing to both? I had the same thought when I switched and then thought “is this just a knee jerk reaction? I can’t think of a decent reason why it’s that annoying when they both appear in my subs feed anyway”
I’m interested to hear why others might not like it as that might be what I’m thinking without realising.
The major concern is whether to cross-post so that members of only one community can see posts from the other, or to avoid cross posts so that people subscribed to both don’t see duplicates
As with almost every other question about the fediverse, we already discussed this to death decades ago and came up with the answers for email. Do what you’d do for two mailing lists on the same topic.
I have literally never in my life managed a mailing list. I have no idea what your answer even implies.
I wasn’t referring to managing. I was referring to posting, as a user. If you haven’t done that either, that doesn’t mean you can’t find all the discussions and decisions and rules and policies people came up with over the last four decades.
Honestly, I’m fine with it. If servers go down, we have multiple fallback communities
Reddit has multiple repeat communities too, they just have different names. Just to take one example, there’s /r/Canada, which got taken over by right wing assholes, /r/metacanada for those same right wing assholes to go full mask off, /r/onguardforthee for the people who didn’t want to put up with the right wing assholes… You get the picture.
The fact that there are multiple overlapping communities with similar purposes can be frustrating, but it also provides layers of redundancy, which is what the fediverse is all about. We’ve been learning a lot of object lessons recently about the problems of putting all your eggs in one basket.
There is currently a pending feature request to add a feature dubbed “multireddit” that communities can add themselves to and where the end user would only have to sub to one multireddit to have access to all the communities with the same on multiple servers. It seems to be opt-in for communities, though, which is good IMO.
Not really. I usually just check the subscriber count and pick the larger one. Unless if they’re about the same, then I’ll sub to both. Just means I’ll see more content. Might be a bit of overlap sometimes, but not always.
I subscribe to both.
And if everyone does that, eventually there will be a main community that emerges and the other ones die.
It just feels like forums of old to me
I don’t like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don’t know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it’s possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. “Cats” and it’s shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.
This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
I really don’t understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that’s the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.
Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit’s r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don’t want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
Once again, this is a feature, not a bug. Two different servers, two different communities, united by a common communication protocol. This is what separates Lemmy from other Reddit clones, and what made it thrive, unlike non-federated sites who are either splintered and languishing, or attracting an unsavory audience.
They aren’t repeat instances they are very different.
