this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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This is that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^(hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.)
If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may "win," you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.
You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.
tl;dr I'll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers
I appreciate how relevant this meme is ๐
I can have my c/aww and eat it too.
You can even create an instance with a domain blackjackandhookers.xxx/c/aww !
/c/instancesifellfor
/m/instancesifellfor
!!!
Ah, dammit
sign me up
Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I've mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.
It's not pointless, it's just......not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that's the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that's perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don't have to pick one and forsake all others.
In regards to your other point, It's also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn't have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It's a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.
That's one of the cons of decentralization. You take the good and the bad.
One of the pros, on that exact same hand, is if you don't like a particular c/aww on a particular instance, you can create your own c/aww on a separate instance and give it the rules you'd like to see in a community where people post cute pictures.
I think the mistake a lot of other newbies are making is believing that this is going to be exactly like Reddit and nothing needs changing ever if we merely build it. No, it's like Reddit, but there are key differences. And you either live with those differences and stick it out until you figure out how it works, you go find another alternative, or you go back to Reddit.
No choice is wrong. Do what works for you.
Coming back to this to say one of the major pros of federation/decentralization is the redundancy will mean you can still get content on Lemmy, even if a particular server goes down. If Reddit goes down, you have to go outside and touch grass. If a Lemmy server goes down, the grass can remain untouched. You'll get content from other instances.
I think one point they're trying to make is that it would be nice to have "supercommunities", for example a kind of community that is the aggregated sum of all the individual communities it subscribes to, so for example super/aww that contains c/aww@1, c/aww@2, etc.
It's open source, they can code this in eventually for sure. I am not making a fuss. I'm patiently waiting for the very hard working founders of Lemmy to eventually carry out the will of the community.
A possible better solution might be to allow the user to create their own group (or super community if you prefer that name) where they can group multiple communities together in a way they see fit (not just necessarily clones of the same community. Examples could be a sports group that allows you to group together communities for all the teams you follow).
This would be beneficial I feel for most users, doesn't affect decentralization, doesn't require a central authority and would be only relevant to each individual user and not applied to anyone else
I can't reply to the other comment,(my first block maybe?) but I wouldn't hold out hope that Reddit exiles will force the devs to say fuck it and make Lemmy a Reddit clone.
Those are in the works if you want to support those, that's not what Lemmy is for. Don't go to a decentralized platform and demand a central authority. ๐คท
EDIT: Downvote harder Reddit stans lmao
It's not a reddit clone just because you can aggregate content, that seems like a rather narrow view. The instances could still host their own communities and the supercommunities could exist alongside one another and choose which communities would be part of them, it would just be a functionality that perhaps some users would find helpful. Wouldn't even have to be on Lemmy but for example on kbin or another alternative.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn't it increase the usefulness of federation since it distributes the data but allows for the communities to remain connected to each other? Couldn't you just not partake of that feature if you're opposed to it?
I'm not talking about a central authority, im talking about an accumulation of content and voting
It'll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it'll be your link factory
Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.
It's similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.
This was my first thought. Reddit had both r/DnD and r/DungeonsAndDragons. It was fine
/r/me_irl and /r/meirl
/r/hiphopheads and /r/rap
This isn't new
Really the protocols can develop "trending" type functionality for popularity, and "aggregate" groups (tag-based, explicit lists of groups, whatever) for which sub...lemmy's are basically "the same". lemmy.world/aww, lemmy.aww/aww, etc. Lemmy may not do it, but it's doable.
Nah, it's more than that. It's a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.
It doesn't start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you're suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs
Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.
At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place
There's also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you're going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don't want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they're going to ruin things
I mean, there's also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they're not cut off from the network, but the instances don't talk directly to each other anymore.
And while we're very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.
I'd like to see science and technology go in that direction because I'll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it's easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization
๐ฅ take my free award. It's yours
and my axe
this is the way
Edit: thanks for the gold!
"wholesome"
I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from aww@lemmy.ml and aww@lemmy.world and awwwwww@sh.itjustworks etc.
If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don't think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.
I'm not opposed to some sort of client side conglomeration, but almost every person I'm seeing isn't looking for a tool to use on their own to customize their feed - they want every iteration of a community name automatically congealed into a single community for them to sub to a la Reddit......
Which can't be done without a central authority. Some people argue makinf a new community which scrapes every iteration of a community name automatically, but that's just content theft at that point.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
By people creating their own groups of subs I mean a group saved on their private app or profile, not some other huge functionality to the system creating lists that is shared publicly, that would require a central authority an major changes. Heck, an app like jerboa could probably do it itself. The people that want to migrate every iteration of a subject into one don't get the fediverse. But being able to add like communities to a list yourself gets rid of the fractured communities downside of the fediverse. If you stumble on another community on the subject you add it to that catagory/group. It would also increase the users investment and loyalty to their account.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.
Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.
Had this same complaint/concern but this is a really good explanation of it. Thanks!
I like to think of it as a bunch of Discord servers (in a way). Each server is run by the owner / their moderation and can have different channels and rules in said server.
The idea of a "super community" doesnt seem like a bad one, but I'd rather have it be an aggregation of said communities then making it all one thing.
... Like maybe super list of c/aww communities that you can subscribe to at once.
I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that "email" analogy I've been seeing
Email explains how instances work really well, since an email domain functions like how instances tagging does.
Communities are a different story, there isn't a good analogue to that.
I'm certainly not opposed to a way to make personal aggregate.......things, but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever. They aren't asking for an ability to pick and choose communities to build a personal "super community" for themselves client side, they want all the c/aww's to be automatically pulled together by a central authority - the thing they're fleeing and came here for the lack of.
I've heard people are working on 1 for 1 Reddit clones, and I'd really like to see those people just go support those projects instead of getting mad that the thing advertising a lack of central authority has no central authority and demanding devs "LiStEn To ThEiR uSeRs" and institute one.
I'll give people the benefit of the doubt. Coming from a centralized service means people are used to things working in a certain way, and they may just not have considered all the advantages of not being forced into a single, centralized service.
I can get that, and have been overall understanding. I've been trying to do my part to explain this isn't that - it's the uptick in hostility over it that has me irate. "I don't get it," "not for me," all fine. "Devs need to make it work like Reddit or else" can fuck off.
I hear you. Yes, not a fan of people being hostile just because something is different.
I'm just hoping that people who enjoy this experience will stay and that more people who also like this experience will join, and that people who want everything to be exactly like Reddit will return to Reddit or to some Reddit-like platform that works exactly like Reddit.
How do I search the various instances?
I'm not sure if there's a better way, but I found this: https://browse.feddit.de/
It crawls most of the instances and lets you search for communities across all of them.
Thanks! I hadn't seen that list yet, it looks pretty good too. Hopefully something similar to either of these options will be included in a future release.
Doubly awesome - not only can you subscribe to both versions of said /c/aww on (most) any server, you will see the content inline with your normal feed so it's effectively just several versions of the same thing.