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How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by blitzen@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

With Lemmy, doesn't it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?

This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I'm quite enjoying myself here.

(page 2) 25 comments

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[–] TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren't/aren't immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who's actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.

Edit: sorry for necroing this thread, I didn't notice how old it was.

[–] sotimely@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

maybe a culture of ea. community listing / linking related/similar ones even if they dont like them? make it easy for people to find ALL the groups for a topic

[–] albert@lemmy.sysctl.io 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe that's a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub's that the instance is aware of :)

Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology

Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In my opinion, it makes most sense that they get treated like the same community.

If you subscribe to "c/memes", you will see the posts from any communities on any instances that's name is "memes".

And if any individual one is causing issue, you or your instance can ban the problem instances' version.

[–] RadDevon@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's one scenario where that idea doesn't work. I was subscribed to /r/pax on Reddit. Occasionally, people would wander through and post about their vapes or ecigs or whatever, not noticing that every post in the subreddit was about the Penny Arcade Expo and not about the ecig/vape brand. (Sorry. I don't know the difference between a vape and an e-cigarette, if there even is one. 😅)

All that to set up this question: what happens when a community is created on one Lemmy instance called "pax" referring to the Penny Arcade Expo while, on another instance, the first mover on "pax" is an e-cig/vape enthusiast? I subscribe for updates on the Penny Arcade Expo, and now, instead of an occasional misguided individual coming through posting about their nicotine enthusiasm, half or more of my posts on "pax" are about that?

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's fair.

I think the best situation is that as a general guideline short abbreviations like that are avoided, and in the case of unavoidable name collisions one or both communities would have to further specify the name to avoid conflict.

So the pros are easier user accessibility, a fix of duplicate communities, and the cons is name collisions and potential abuse from communities on different instances.

[–] icyboyy@lemmy.icyserver.eu 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.

Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers

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