this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

  • people having to subscribe to both to see the content
  • posters having to crosspost to both
  • comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

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[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

Not trying to be mean, but … you’re making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D

I'm trying to prevent a scenario that I see could happen: Lemmy stays stuck in its current state for a while, most of the users are leaving because the content is hard to get to, partially due to the number of redundant communities.

Lemmy's userbase keeps focused on the usual 4 core topics: news, memes, tech, foss.

The userbase shrinks back to what it was before the Reddit API changes, hence under 5 thousands monthly active users, talking about this 4 core topics. Most of the enthusiasts go back to Reddit using Rrvanced apps or other tricks.

Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet.

They can, but I'm always afraid they leave Lemmy altogether rather than just a few communities.