This is quite a similar to other recent questions and breaks rule #3 related to using Lemmy.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
24 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43889 readers
2881 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
For now I subscribe to multiple communities, but I really hope the Lemmy devs figure out a way to let each user create a community group.
The way I envision it is that you can create a group where you can combine communities on your end, and you can then cross-post to these communities when you post to that community group.
On the other hand, there would need to be a way to ensure that cross-posts aren't generating a ton of duplicates to those subscribed to multiple communities, and I'm not sure how the comments on these cross-posts should be dealt with. Maybe the comments should be kept separate per cross-post, or maybe if you have these communities in a group there could be a way to display the comments from there multiple posts together, to ensure all those crossposts have a change to get some interaction on other instances?
Then there's also the possibility of spammers abusing the system.
There is still place for improvement.
nope, users MUST not create groups and cross-post to these groups...
I don't want idiots to put gonewild and technology into the same group and see their dicks in my feed... I'm fine with boobs, but no dicks.
So... by "users MUST not", you mean you'd prefer if they didn't.
Some restrictions could be added to avoid dumb mistakes like this, like how you cannot add NSFW and non-NSFW communities in the same group
I mean, adding a cute dog photo to a Linux subreddit is not ideal as well.
I like the idea of viewing multiple communities. However, I don't like the idea of cross-posting to all communities at the same time - it would prevent communities with overlapping topics to diverge and specialise, since people would mostly post the same stuff in all of them.
Instead I think that a multireddits-like approach is better: you group comms for visualisation, and your group can be either private or public. If public, other people can copy your group, so they use it instead of subscribing to individual comms.
For all the times I've seen people complain about this, I still don't see what the supposed problem is.
Yeah - it's just a tiny bit more effort to subscribe to three communities instead of one, but then that's it. It doesn't matter in the slightest from that point on, since all three of them are going to come up just the same in my feed.
I honestly think that there really isn't a problem - that really, there's no notable way in which anyone is actually negatively affected. It's just that it's different, and different is bad.
The problem is when it's a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.
Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won't get an answer. If I'm a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective...due to the synergy.
Right, but exactly because that's a thing that people value, the "problem" will be solved organically. Community searches already default to sorting by activity, so over time, one community will come to be seen as the de facto "main" community for that topic. Just as is the case on other forums, except over time and by consensus instead of from the start and by decree.
That's not exactly how it's working in practice.
Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that's kind of how it's working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by "all" instead of by "local", you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance's members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).
Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it's almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.
The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation...fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.
The only way it would be 'solved organically' as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances -- but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.
Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.
Those third party search tools already exist. I expect that apps will begin linking to them or even including their own version of the same function.
And really, it's vanishingly unlikely that somebody so dull-witted that they couldn't even find the most notable instance on a given topic if it wasn't already on their instance's All is going to end up on such an obscure instance in the first place.
Again, I don't think it's a usability problem at all - I think it's just people expecting the fediverse to be essentially identical to the monolithic corporate social media to which they're accustomed, then faulting it for not being so.
I must be completely "dull witted" then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official "join-lemmy.org" website, clicked on "join a server" and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn't know any better.
After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that's all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn't seeing everything?
Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don't, and I'm telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.
That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the “merge” functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.
But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. There’s strength in diversity too.
See though, I still don't see the issue.
you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin
How are they spread too thin?
This thread and the OP are on lemmy.ml. I'm on kbin.social. You're on lemmy.world. And the only reason I know all of that is because I checked each one. Until I checked each one, it was just a thread and I responded to it and you responded to me and it all just worked and there was no way to even notice that three different instances were involved, since it made zero difference.
If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect.
What benefit is that?
Right now, I can go into the list of communities on any instance and search for a subject and get all the communities that are about it. And yes, as I already noted, if I want all of them, then that means I have to click on more than one subscribe button - a few seconds of extra effort.
So the only "benefit" I see is saving myself that few seconds of extra effort, which hardly seems worth caring about.
I genuinely don't see a real problem.
It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.
A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.
I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.
I'm not sure that most wouldn't, but yeah - I don't doubt that some wouldn't subscribe to multiple instances.
I had a whole section here about the notion that quantity equals quality and the benefits of barriers to entry and so on, but it felt digressive at best, so I'll just say that (with multiple provisos) I do at least see how it might be legitimately believed that redundant communities are an actual problem, so that's something.
Thanks for the responses.
We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.
And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.
There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.
But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.
now multiply 3/4 with 30 and you get ~100 communities to subscribe to
The way I see it, some communities will thrive and others will die. No need to worry about the mess in the process. For now during this early stage just post to all of them or pick one you like and stick with it.
If it's a niche interest such as photography, I would just subscribe to all and see which one is the best over a few weeks.
If it's a more dynamic topic such as technology, I will go for the most curated version if it (Beehaw communities are usually good ones, at least to me), and only subscribe to one. Otherwise I'm getting overwhelmed with multiple occurrences of the same article.
The only one I'm struggling with is the technology communities. I am subscribed to 4 of them, but the same user is posting the same articles to all 4, so I see the same things over and over. Since they all mostly have the same content, I want to unsubscribe from all but the most popular, but I'm lazy and haven't done it.
I'm joining all the ones I'm interested in, redundant or not. I'm looking at all the posts, wherever they are, and commenting on them regardless of where they are if I'm inclined. If I want to make a post, I tend to do it on the largest or most active version, and I don't tend to cross post.
It's not too bad, minus people crossposting the same content across each instance
Much like I ignored reddit usernames in the comment section, I tend to ignore which instance a post is coming from while scrolling. So I subscribe to all the relevant ones, and just scroll from my "subscribed" in my instance.
I've never much cared for the details of a lot of communities/subs outside of very specialized ones. I'm going to participate if the topic is interesting and learn about the rules as I go. There being multiple communities for the same thing was pretty common on reddit.
I started by joining only one instance (vlemmy.net). When it went down, I realized I needed more, so I joined 3.
As for the communities, I subscribed to whichever clone had more traffic, among the ones I'm interested in.
I comment and post from whatever instance I'm logged on, as sometimes - especially in the recent weeks - one or two are temporarily down.
You mean that u created 3 accounts on 3 different instances? Why?
Interesting, came from lemmy.world to say hi from there too, but this is your last comment in the thread when accessing from there. It's one of the largest instances, but the slowest of the 3 I use.
Not to be rude, but they clearly explained why. I did pretty much the same thing after my main account on Vlemmy died
Okay, after reading it several times I think I got it, thanks for pointing it out.
When vlemmy.net died permanently, it took my only login into lemmy, and my list of subbed communities.
Having learned the hard way about the volatility of theninstances, I don't want to have to go through the login creation and resubbing communities everytime this happens, and I like my login (it's the same for everything sinxe the 90s), so I created "fallback" logins in other instances (sh.itjust.works, feddit.nl, lemmy.world), as backups, and also to "reserve" my login name.
I have all of them configured in Jerboa, when any of them is down, I just switch. Interestingly, the one that I've never seen down is the smallest, feddit.nl.
Here's me from feddit.nl.
I'm posting to the communities that seem active enough for me.
This is how I use the site:
- Sort by New Comment
- Scroll through feed
- See something that interests me or makes me think of something I think is clever/witty
- Open the comments
- Read them/post my own.
- Continue to read them and post replies until bored.
- Go to 1.
I'm not, I just post/read/comment wherever. Sometimes the same articles will pop up repeatedly but I just ignore them.
I actually think Lemmy should take a page from Mastodon here. Instead of users creating groups (which sounds like a huge headache to implement smoothly), Lemmy should add hashtags or something similar. So I would sub to #photography and people posting would be restricted to a max number of hashtags (TBD). You can then choose to stay subbed to the hashtag and/or sub to the communities that crop up frequently on your feed and then unsub from the hashtag if you want.
I have loved the idea of subbing to hashtags since PhotoVine and wish desperately that this was a universally employed function of all social media platforms. I think Tumblr is the only other platform that has this as a built-in feature now. Ice Cubes just added a make-shift function to create a list of hashtags their Mastodon client (possibly by my request).
To be honest, I don't even know what instance I'm looking at most of the time. My app doesn't show the instance name, only the community name, and the community names are often all identical across instances.
I don't even know man this shit is so confusing. I used to just comment and upvote when I saw shit I liked but now how will I know if the shit I liked came from one server or another. This is just madness we can't keep treating people this way!
That's the thing, you don't have to care which server is comes from. You can just comment and upvote as usual.
But then how will I know which instance is the real one and not the impostor? What if I join an itailian instance, will I be the impasta?
If you have two friends called Tom, are they the same to you? You are rarely@sh.itjust.works, if a rarely@lemmy.world or rarely@lemmy.ml comes up, he will not be you
I'm sorry, but I think we've fallen victim to Poe's Law here. Fret not, I understand the concept well, I was just cosplaying as someone who did not, laregly out of frustration for mankind's dependency on centralized services.
view more: next ›