Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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This is Lemmy's greatest weakness, in my opinion. It's too decentralized. I want one place (Lemmy) to go to for everything about my topics of interest. Everyone keeps explaining it as "lemmy.world is like Reddit and lemmy.ml is like Twitter." No. No it's not. It's all Lemmy. It's just that there are multiple Lemmys, each with their own separate sections for each topic, and anyone can make a new Lemmy at any time. That's a problem. I don't want to become part of a community, no matter how big and popular it becomes, only to find out that there is a better one on a different Lemmy server and I've been wasting my time this whole time. This just means that if Lemmy were set up properly then that better community would have been the one that I would have found because it is easy to find and the website design lends itself to finding relevant topics of interest. Right now Lemmy is so frustrating to use. It looks worse than Old Reddit and is less user friendly than New Reddit. Lemmy will never see the popularity or usefulness that Reddit has had if it stays decentralized like this. Imagine asking your friend where on Twitter they found an interesting post and they reply, "No, no, it's not on Twitter 35, it's on Twitter 83." That's dumb as hell. We don't need multiple Reddits, multiple Twitters, or multiple Lemmys.
I think you are missing the point of Lemmy if you think it's "too decentralized". Too many Reddit refugees are eager to bend Lemmy into some kind of Reddit-shaped clone and failed to realize the differences are mostly intentional.
I actually think that multiple communities about the same topic isn't as big of an issue as most people make it out to be. If two "competing" communities grows to be large enough you will eventually get the similar content and it doesn't really matter which one you sub to, unless of course if one is "toxic" then the choice is clear. And you can always sub to both.
Reddit also had this exact same issue. For every r/flashlight you'd have a r/flashlights, r/realflashlight, r/flashlight2, r/torches, r/handbright, etc. Then you'd even have niche subsubreddits like r/flashlightslightingupdarkrooms. I never really considered this a problem because I like having different options available to me. I never really see the same thing posted enough times for it to be a problem, so usually it's just twice as much content to subscribe to both, which I'm happy with. I wouldn't really consider communities to be competing with each other, and the redundancy is actually really nice as a user. You're free to only subscribe to the community you like more if you really want to limit your subscriptions for some reason.
Whenever someone brings this up, which seems to be daily, I just think of the amount of different subs I was on Reddit for for the same or similar things and think well it's not really that different. There were always several for reading, history etc and the same is true here so...
You can just do a quick check to see the most active group and join that one if you really just want the one which I sometimes do. Or just join loads and see which ones are best which I also sometimes do... It's all part of the fun for me but it really seems to bug some people
I don't disagree with you, but I think it would be cool if communities could federate too. If I'm subscribed to baseball@lemmy.world, it would be neat if baseball served up posts from all communities that they choose to associate with. Otherwise I would never know that there's a sports-only instance out there that also has a huge baseball following.
It would be nice if a moderator could set a community/magazine's to also display threads from other trusted communities on different instances
This is exactly what I mean. Decentralization requires better tools to bring content to the users. Having to manually search is not going to help lemmy get the critical mass it needs.
Honestly, some of this can be kludged by mods working together, or at least not guarding their turf too jealously. Simply putting the other communities in the sidebar could be a start. We don't HAVE to wait for an algorithm to share knowledge, or let the lack of perfect tools be the enemy of good
ones.
Are you saying that if you are subscribed to a Baseball community, Lemmy should sub you to all the baseball related communities whether you consented to it or not? Is that really a good idea? And kinda sounds like you want an "algorithm" to make decisions for you.
And if you search for a "baseball" community you should see the all relevant major communities across federated instances come up anyways, so I don't think there is a problem there.
Tbh I do want an algorithm to make decisions for me. It’s something I’m missing a ton from Reddit/Twitter.
Discoverability is shit on this site. It’s like that because there’s no other option in the current system, but I fully believe federation won’t ever take off mainstream because it’s decentralized.
100% agree discoverability can be improved but I think algorithms are basically the antithesis of the Fediverse.
And it's totally okay if Lemmy or other Fediverse apps never takes the "mainstream". I'm totally onboard with it not going down the road of Reddit.
This wouldn't be an algorithm. This would be the moderators of 'tadpoles' on someinstance.social deciding they would also like to display content from 'tadpoles' on someotherinstance.xyz
Then provide an ability to consent.
My point is that there could be a nearly identical community elsewhere that I would never know about unless the community I'm subscribed to straight up tells me it exists.
Early Lemmy adopters seem to think that being hard to use is a good thing. The algorithm boogeyman isn't going to get you if there's a way to subscribe to baseball@* with a blacklist.
If it's nearly identical then why does it matter which one you sub to?
Being hard to use isn't a good thing but also isn't always a "bug". Some of the Fediverse behaviors are by design as an antithesis to bigcorp centralization like Reddit - the point IS to have that level of autonomy and separation (instances and individualized communities).
I get that what you described isn't exactly an argument FOR centralization but my point is it's not as big as an issue and it will probably shake itself out. You might argue that it's a huge blocker for Lemmy to go mainstream, but that's not the point.
If you're looking at pictures of cats, it's not a big deal. If you're asking for support with a niche operating system, it's nice to know that what you're looking at is the entirety of Lemmy's resources without having to manually check that a new community popped up or federated in. Which is something that's happening a lot as Lemmy gets more popular.
It's sounds like we disagree on the benefits of decentralized communities. And I do understand your thoughts, I just think that the tools for finding content should be more automated to get the full benefit.
Have a good one
Wow, there was a whole conversation beneath my comment and neither lemmy.world nor the Jerboa app gave me any kind of indication that someone had replied to me. God, Lemmy fucking sucks.
Ouch, not even Inbox notification?
Voyager works quite well even though there is no Push.
Try connect for lemmy, you can enable notifications