As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
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reddit also had that a bunch of places, for example /r/gaming /r/games /r/truegaming.
I hear there’s also eight or nine cat related subs
Reddit had similar issues. There were quite often multiple subreddits that were essentially the same thing. Sometimes it was just that multiple people made similar subreddits, sometimes there was one original subreddit that had some sort of schism.
It’s just that Reddit had a large enough userbase that two near-identical subreddits could do well enough that one didn’t supplant the other.
Yeah, but not really. You couldn’t create r/Doug twice. You could create r/Dougs or r/Dougie, but not two r/Doug. Here, you can create a “Doug” for every server that exists.
I have hope for solutions though. There’s only about 8,000 active subreddits in total. The cream will rise to the top quickly and we’ll all get used to subscribing to the ‘top 3 or 4’ “Doug” communities and I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.
I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, it would give the impression of something that is not there. Imagine talking to someone about a post that you just read but that someone else literally can’t see because they aren’t using the app, so they can’t see that instance. Plus, how do you handle communities on instances that have been blocked by some other instances?
A better way would be to have a way to officially merge these communities within ActivityPub. Effectively, have a protocol for cross instance communities, and then the mods of the disparate communities would just have to actively choose to join their communities. It’d be like the reddit sub splitting, but in reverse!
Look, as long as I don’t have to remember both a community AND a server name, I’m good. I just don’t want to hav to remember and / or subscribe to multiple things with the exact same name.
I can understand that desire, but think about this from a practical perspective. You are on lemmy.world, but someone else is on lemmy.ml. If you both use the same app that does this behind the scenes aggregation for you, you won’t be able to tell which instance is holding which post. Let’s say someone on sh.itjust.works posts on their instance of a community, but the app just makes it appear like it’s in the community.
Now, if lemmy.world blocks sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml does not, then you can’t see that post, since it’s blocked for you. But the person on lemmy.ml and on sh.itjust.works would be able to see it. This is a good example of solving a problem by create a dozen new ones.
Lemmy developers have been discussing how to address this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
There isn’t a clear solution, since some communities have different names, so how would an app know to join them? Or would you join communities that had deliberately been split for various reasons?
I think a solution could be to allow communities to merge voluntarily if the mods of both agree to. It would only work with instances that aren’t blocked anywere. But users that would be subscibed to one would automatically be subscibed to all the merged commuities as well and you could post to the merged commuity from any of the participating instances. That would have the advantage that if one instance fails the community would almost seamlessly continue on the other instances.
Yeah I this is my biggest problem, and there’s always like 30 people saying “it’s not a problem, it’s a feature!”
Either they are in denial or I’m just completely incompatible with federation.
Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing? If I wanted to consume content from all of them sure, I could follow all 100 but that is so tedious. Plus what if I wanted to interact with them? I’d have to ask the same question 100 times!
I think 100 is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration and it matters in this case. Subbing to perhaps 5 communities about Formel 1 cars or whatever have you is not so much of an ordeal. Especially because probably most users in these communities will also be subbed to the other communities. So you very likely won’t need to post the same stuff multiple times.
It would be great though, if communities would group better in some way, perhaps like tabs in my own dashboard where I can sort the communities by topic.
It would also help if people would use the community browser to see if there are similar communities already to the one they plan to make, so that they can connect with each other.
I’m on Fediverse for few years and reading all the replies here I find it … sad? Funny? I really don’t know what to think of this. It looks like for many people the biggest disadvantage of federation is federation itself … It feels like people want the centralization and don’t want to have options (or rather think about the options)
Or is it an age thing? I’m kind of used to lurk the internet and find what I want. But I can imagine that people raised on f.e. Netflix, Amazon where it’s like “BAM! Here you have everything” aren’t used to this
I work in a space adjacent to change management (ERP implementation) and honestly, be happy and kind. These questions are the absolute default ones of humans attempting to puzzle out a paradigm shift. And the fact they’re here and they’re feeling loved enough to actually ask for help with their new mental model of it is about eight degrees better than it could have been.
So my answer is: it’s just like r/games, r/gaming, r/videogames, r/patientgamers. They are all the same subject matter with overlapping content and userbases, with potentially wildly different moderation biases and groupthinks. And that was all on one centralised Reddit! You subbed to some, or all of them, as you saw fit, you maybe even managed a multireddit to group them! It’s just the same here except they’re on different instances and soon, enhancements to Lemmy pending, will be just as seamless to manage.
Wow this is such a great take on this whole matter. The status with Lemmy or the Fediverse in general reminds me a lot of how the internet was two decades or so ago. And I think people are going to like it a lot when they figure it out. Depending on the amount of people staying, Lemmy will probably change too a bit. I think it’s exciting but there will obviously be a few people with… errr growing pains. I hope not too many Lemmy users feel invaded or something.
