Redundant communities across instances

This is that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^{hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.}

If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may "win," you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.

You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.

tl;dr I'll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers
- I appreciate how relevant this meme is 😂
- I can have my c/aww and eat it too.
- You can even create an instance with a domain blackjackandhookers.xxx/c/aww !
- sign me up
Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I've mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.
- It's not pointless, it's just......not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that's the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that's perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don't have to pick one and forsake all others.
  In regards to your other point, It's also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn't have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It's a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.
- It'll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it'll be your link factory
- Nah, it's more than that. It's a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.
  It doesn't start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you're suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs
  Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.
  At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place
  There's also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you're going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don't want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they're going to ruin things
  I mean, there's also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they're not cut off from the network, but the instances don't talk directly to each other anymore.
  And while we're very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.
  I'd like to see science and technology go in that direction because I'll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it's easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization
🥈 take my free award. It's yours
- and my axe
- "wholesome"
I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from aww@lemmy.ml and aww@lemmy.world and awwwwww@sh.itjustworks etc.
If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don't think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.
- I'm not opposed to some sort of client side conglomeration, but almost every person I'm seeing isn't looking for a tool to use on their own to customize their feed - they want every iteration of a community name automatically congealed into a single community for them to sub to a la Reddit......
  Which can't be done without a central authority. Some people argue makinf a new community which scrapes every iteration of a community name automatically, but that's just content theft at that point.
- Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.
  Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.
Had this same complaint/concern but this is a really good explanation of it. Thanks!
I like to think of it as a bunch of Discord servers (in a way). Each server is run by the owner / their moderation and can have different channels and rules in said server.
The idea of a "super community" doesnt seem like a bad one, but I'd rather have it be an aggregation of said communities then making it all one thing.
... Like maybe super list of c/aww communities that you can subscribe to at once.
- I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that "email" analogy I've been seeing
- I'm certainly not opposed to a way to make personal aggregate.......things, but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever. They aren't asking for an ability to pick and choose communities to build a personal "super community" for themselves client side, they want all the c/aww's to be automatically pulled together by a central authority - the thing they're fleeing and came here for the lack of.
  I've heard people are working on 1 for 1 Reddit clones, and I'd really like to see those people just go support those projects instead of getting mad that the thing advertising a lack of central authority has no central authority and demanding devs "LiStEn To ThEiR uSeRs" and institute one.
- I'm not sure if there's a better way, but I found this: https://browse.feddit.de/
  It crawls most of the instances and lets you search for communities across all of them.
Doubly awesome - not only can you subscribe to both versions of said /c/aww on (most) any server, you will see the content inline with your normal feed so it's effectively just several versions of the same thing.

there were redundant communities on reddit, there are always redundant communities, we are in a phase where we will see more not less. This is not a huge issue overall, though it will be distressing to those who have become accustom to what 6 and 7 figure subs are like.

realistically, i dont think its the best idea to hand any one server the majoirty of any topic or content, you will end up with the same problems all over again. Instead I would want to see tagging and a way to integrate community content from multiple communities. Something as simple as being able to make a community that is just a subscription list of many communities and shows thier content will work.

People were promoting tagging on Reddit as early as 2008. They came up with subreddits which did about 50% of the work of tagging, but also allowed communities to stay distinct and establish their own cultures. I think the lack of tagging is what made Reddit so special, and I think Lemmy shouldn’t implement it either.
Regarding redundancy, I agree. I’m from Seattle, and people migrated from /r/Seattle to /r/SeattleWA to /r/seawa as the culture of each shifted. I can see something like that happening here.
- I mean tagging posts and reddit had that, you no like?
  Rather than make a node with 12 communities because i want to segment content i want to make a server with 1 community and tags. yes reddit called it "flair"

I just collect them like candy. Oh, another tech board? Added.

I don't particularly care which community a post comes from. Subbing for me is so I am made aware of their posts. I honestly don't care where it was posted.

Me too. But I'm probably never going to check most them just to see if they are even alive since it's just too much of an hassle.

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!
- Auto-combining would be a terrible idea, because you can't guarantee that everything with the same name is actually on the same topic, or has the same posting culture. One Doug might be about the cartoon character, the other might be about a real person named Doug.
yeah, a lot of subreddits have a clone like /r/offmychest and /r/trueoffmychest, because someone didn't like moderation and created their own version.
yeah, a lot of subreddits had a clone like /r/offmychest and /r/trueoffmychest, because someone didn't like moderation and created their own version.

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.
- Greeting @24Vindustrialdildo@sh.itjust.works fellow ERP implementor! Your comment really hit a spot. I have many years of technical and functional knowledge, a huge amount of business domain knowledge, and most of my day is spent managing change/expectations.
  Do you have a an ERP community you subscribe to?
I think it's just as simple as:
Most people want the decentralisation perk of not having a single profit driven company controlling everything, and that is where it ends.
Other than that, people would rather just have everything in one place where everyone is, but of course that is antithesis to the whole decentralised model.
People have gotten used to the convenience and ease of the silos, and people don't want that taken away.
I keep having this image of the owner of a small cottage who has gradually been making his cottage lovely, repairing bits, adding cozy furniture, hanging out with his friends playing his ukulele on the porch.
The huge apartment building down the road burns down, and he invites the huge crowd of refugees into his cottage for shelter. They immediately start complaining that his cottage is too small, it doesn’t have an elevator, how come there’s no exercise room, ewww there’s cat hair on this rocking chair, that color of pain sucks, how could you be so stupid as to have a slow cooker in your kitchen, we need to add on so tell your friends to get off the porch so we can turn it into a sexy new studio…..
- And then they build their own cottages, and mcmansions, and apartment blocks, along with all the noise and detritus... and now your cozy little cottage is just a house in bustling village

I'm just trying to subscribe to as many of the duplicates as I come across for communities I see and like. I suspect eventually some will become the most popular ones and 'win' the unofficial title as the 'main one' if the overall user base continues to grow. Am I right in thinking it also depends on which instances your 'home instance' continues to federate with (IE admins don't block) or have I totally misunderstood and overcomplicated how it works in my mind?

If I'm understanding this whole thing correctly: an instance that your 'home instance' (where you signed up) has federated with might host a larger user base for one community, but if their admins blocks your home instance or vice versa, you lose the ability to interact with that community(?) I would think this means ideally you want your home instance to host the community that 'wins' so you're less likely to lose access, right?

So if hypothetically for whatever reason lemmy.world or lemmy.ml blocked the other, users who signed up on lemmy.world would lose access to the communities hosted on lemmy.ml and vice versa. So duplicates would still pop up if the most popular community is hosted somewhere your home doesn't have access to, right? I'm far less likely to create multiple accounts just to access an unofficial 'main' cat community than I am to just click 'subscribe' on any available sub with the word 'cat' in it.

I am also still trying to wrap my head around how all this connects, right now just testing things out on lemmy.world while my friend is setting up their own instance that I might hop onto. Just interested to see how all this plays out!
I think defederation is an interesting element to Lemmy, but I wouldn't sweat too much over it. It's highly unlikely that any large instances are going to defederate from each other without a good reason. Namely NSFW content (so boobs don't show up on your "all" feed) and major political differences (so tankies and fascists and others with extreme political views don't bombard your communities). If you do want to subscribe to an instance with extreme political views or with boobs, then you'll probably need to have a few accounts for those different exceptions. And they can both be logged in at the same time. You can go to lemmy.world when you want regular content and lemmynsfw.com when you want boobs. But I really don't think you're going to feel defederation very much. Only in those exceptional cases. And there will always be instances that allow both the regular content and the nsfw/extreme content. If you disagree with your instance admins, you just need to find an instance that better matches what you want to see.
For what it's worth, lemmy.world seems pretty committed to not defederating. They haven't defederated from lemmygrad.ml (communist lemmy) like many other instances have. The only instance they've blocked explicitly approves of people posting loli (underage anime porn), which is pretty damming.
- Yeah I'm actually really glad we are defederated with that instance, I definitely don't want to see those things and it made me think pretty highly of this instances admins. There are definitely lines that shouldn't be crossed and it seems the admins here understand that while still wanting to be open which is pretty cool.
  So while lemmy.world probably won't block them, if lemmygrad.ml blocked lemmy.world would I still be able to see posts from communities I've subscribed to from there or would everything be cut off? I'm not really here to participate in online politics but I like reading it. American politics is an interest and I am a socialist so I enjoy seeing different opinions, but I try to keep my political activities to irl local politics in my own country, I just want memes and to be able to read differing opinions of Americans even if I don't engage directly with them.
- Aaaaaand I'm already eating my words...

It’ll sort itself out. Kinda like how you could have a bunch of different subreddits about the same thing (r/gaming vs r/games vs r/videogames, for example) but one always bubbles up to be the biggest main community. Similar will happen here. There’ll be many instances for the same thing, but eventually there’ll be “the one” that becomes the unofficial official one.

I actually think it is good to have alternatives
in your example, r/gaming was the largest gaming sub but I was subscribed to r/games because I enjoyed the content and discussion there more
each instance/community will have its own culture and each user can decide which one fits their style better

I just sub to both if I run into a sublemmy collision where both are sizable. It is a little weird and I'd like to see some clean way to merge them in the future (i.e. with content migration and redirects), but for now it is what it is.

Now what we need are concatenated multi-communities where I can have a linkable collection of each of these overlapping subscriptions at multiple federated instances. In RES they were "multi-reddits" and they were my primary way of compartmentalizing and consuming content.
- I suggested this in a different thread, but I think it would be cool to be able to create and share feeds surrounding a topic. All the posts from the communities that are included in the feed show up there, and you can share that feed with other people so they don't need to do all the hard work of discovery themselves.
  Surely the devs are already looking at something like this.
- Multireddits were actually a native Reddit feature, not an RES thing. I think something else that would help is better xposting support. Right now it basically copies a link from one community to another
I think two communities can live side-by-side and even develop their own culture. With federation, someone subscribed to both essentially has no downside right? I think forcing merges would cause some issues (like, who moderates?).
It would definitely be confusing once communities start coming up with rules for posting, like one gaming community from instance A could allow memes but gaming community from Instance B doesn't allowes, or only allows text posts, no screenshots, etc.

Imo. This is the opposite of having a too big of a community. I think this is just a disadvantage of federation that we will eventually have to live with. The opposite is a bigger problem in my opinion, where one entity controls too much of the power.

What we really need is a better system, be it an app or chrome extension where it makes it easier for us to manage these instances version of their communities.

I don't know what that looks like but the answer isn't difficult to come up with because for the most part, all the lemmies will function the same as each other.

This is actually a very compelling OSS project to make. A Lemmy manager like rss readers of past.

Reddit apps already did this - where you could create a "multireddit" which was an amalgamation of various subreddits.
Ironally it looks like Lemmy actually has some sort of RSS functionality you can tap into to make that happen.
- Like in the very early internet where your daily blog roll is opening the rss viewer. Everywhere on the web that updated that you subscribed to, and there are viewers that can filter and collate iirc. so your daily update is local, and you only go to the ones you are actually interested in.
  Firefox rss support was removed in 2018, and lmao i only knew because i was trying to set up the rss feed from lemmy last night.
I think the real solution is to have something similar to an rss feed that can aggregate several different instances of the "same" sub. Like maybe a central server, but it only has the info to gather data from all other servers or something

I'd say it's a problem that will solve itself. Beehaw's gaming communities seem to be doing better than Lemmy's, and I'd highly encourage giving them a look. Part of the greatness of the federation system is that we don't have to host EVERYTHING locally (and it's probably not desirable to).

After all, if Lemmy does some stuff really well, and Beehaw does some stuff really well, both of us can thrive together without both sides having to eat hosting costs for double hosting all the content.

Beehaw seems to be coming in strong. I almost made an account on their server but for some reason they don't allow downvotes which I feel could be an issue in the future.
- It might be, but a number of Reddit communities did that via CSS as well and forums before that didn't even have voting systems at all.
  Time will tell. Part of the excitement of all this is going to be watching how everything develops
beehaw blocks many other instances though. I don't feel like supporting them to grow. Too centralized.

I think it will for the most part sort itself out. I do see this issue has been brought up before but didn't get much traction.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I think that something like being able to group communities by topics would help a lot. You could then just sub to all communities that are tagged with the topic, then the fragmentation really doesn't matter nearly as much. Posts would get spread out across communities and instances (which I think is a good thing) but would still have a decent amount of visibility.

I'm seeing a lot linking other popular similar communities in a pinned post, and honestly I'm preferring it cause you can follow them all - or a more specific 'flavour' of it without getting all the rest. I think the nicest thing to add would be the ability to make a post across communities with features like shared comments and not showing up on the feed twice, so broader topics can still be broadly posed (and not reposted)

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 it's just a problem that will work itself out over time with more users. There are redundant subreddits as well, but as the overall userbase grew only one or two subs maintained the subscriber growth to continue showing up on r/all. And in cases where redundant subs both grew together, they evolved to be very different atmospheres. For example, r/games vs r/gaming; one is focused on news and discussion while the other is mostly memes. Both great subs, but started out nearly identical until they found their identity.
The reason you want a 100 communities over one is what is happening over on Reddit. Make one big thing, and greed will take over. Make many smaller ones? Is significantly less likely to happen.
- The communities are also significantly less likely to grow. It's a double edged sword.
  I think both sides have a point here, there are clear positives to federation and clear negatives. I hope a lot of the negatives can be overcome by streamlining the user interface and better apps.
You might be completely incompatible with federation. I mean this with zero ill intention, it just might not be the alternative YOU are looking for. Reddit and lemmy are separate projects with separate goals and means. Centralization is what led to the issues leading to people exodusing from Reddit, but now everyone is upset that it's not centralized here. If you want one single set of users crammed into one single set of communities, this just isn't it by design.
As somebody who likes sharing my opinion and bickering about them, I've run afoul of power mods on Reddit in the past and been blanket banned from like 8 subs at once for liking firehouse subs over subway or some such nonsense. Here, if I'm banned from !AITA@lemmy.world I can still fiddle around on !AITA@lemmy.ml. I can spin up my own instance and start !AITA@lemmy.mything if I want.
It's important to remember that this is NOT REDDIT. This is a different project with different goals and different methods of achieving those goals. IIRC there are people trying to build a more 1 for 1 replacement for Reddit, and if that's what you want - great! Find one and enjoy it, but don't try to force lemmy to centralize and just become Reddit 2, because that's not the goal or intention of the project.
- undefined> Centralization is what led to the issues leading to people exodusing from Reddit, but now everyone is upset that it’s not centralized here
  Every locals complaint about people moving to their area ever, "they hated Idaho so much but now they're here trying to turn Arkansas right back into Idaho!"
- Here, if I'm banned from !AITA@lemmy.world I can still fiddle around on !AITA@lemmy.ml.
  Huh, you can? I've been told that bans are federated, so if you're banned on one lemmy instance, you are also automatically banned across all connected instances.
Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing?
I believe over time it'll sort out and one community will be dominant. But the reason you want this is so whoever got c/canada won't be dominant. If the mod of c/canada was a QAnon lizardpeople nut, you wouldn't need to make c/RealCanada because there's not a single real c/canada. You would make c/canada@lemmy.ml
But also, many communities were spread out even in reddit. Like r/traa and r/egg_irl.
Tbh this isn't even unique to Lemmy. Even on reddit, creating a new subreddit is free. If you don't like the moderation or the general vibe of a subreddit, create a new one and build the community that you like. with the ethos that you see fit. That's how there's r/gaming, r/truegaming, r/games, r/pcgaming, r/gamernews, etc.
Reddit also only allowed comments in 2008, and Digg v4 was released in 2010. Therefore much of the reddit "canon" was developed after the Digg migration (e.g. today you tomorrow me, cumbox, forthewolfx, swamps of Dagobah, discoball, jolly ranchers, double dick dude, taco show, broken arms). Digg didn't have custom communities. Reddit did. And now Lemmy has custom communities in infinite instances. If there's going to be a Quit Reddit Day (maybe July 1st?) like Quit Digg Day, we're in the forefront of shaping Lemmy.
I don't think it's a problem or a feature. It's exactly what we saw on Reddit before it grew. It's not like Reddit had a limit on the number of subreddits a topic could have. As far as I'm concerned it'll eventually sort itself out just like it did on Reddit. It'll just take time to establish which communities are the largest. Eventually people will stop posting/subscribing to the communities that don't have as many people, and the largest one(s) will win out, just like they did on Reddit. This is an issue that requires patience. In the meantime, subscribe to them all and post to the one that has the most subscribers just like you would on Reddit if there wasn't a clear central community.
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.

This will probably take care of itself with time. Not having any "official" ones dictated by some central authority is kind of the whole idea of the fediverse.

Agreed - this was my initial concern as well but now that I've gotten used to the structure here it doesn't seem like an issue. The whole Digg > Reddit > "New Monolith" wasn't ever going to solve the problem of enshittification, it would just buy us some time, and probably not much at that. This feels a necessary paradigm shift, and the multiple overlapping communities really turns into a failsafe more than an inconvenience.
They all still populate the same on a feed if you're subbed anyway.
- They don’t though, my feed of the same community looks different on each instance due to the vote counts being different

We are still in the discovery zone where the communities are spread out, over time it will stabilize.

I think the main solution is to have an easy way of searching for existing communities before deciding to make you own. browse.feddit.de seems to be a good step in that direction to me.

Does it really know all communities? I'm on feddit.de and created a bunch of communities there as a rexxiteer because I could not find them.
- No idea honestly. My best guess would be that browse.feddit.de hasn't cached those communities yet if you just recently created them. There's options to turn on/off different instances in the sidebar, and it looks like feddit.de is on by default.
- how long ago? I started an instance yesterday and its only been this afternoon that im starting to see posts in my ALL lists that are not also my subscriptions.

I think it is just going to be one of those crazy growing pains until users start picking one of them. And in true internet fashion, I fully expect gaming to consolidate around two, starting the next great flame war.

We just need a more user-friendly way for all the !gaming instances to be grouped together, with users having the control of adding/removing what makes up their personal !gaming on their chosen fediverse instance.

The lemmy ui could add a way to group communities at the user level. Something like multi reddits.

I also struggle to see the issue here. People will subscribe to the various communities across instances, and they’ll quit the ones they don’t like, thereby making the best ones rise to the top, just like it works across subreddits of the same topic.

I guess the concern is discoverability? On mobile web, Beehaw’s homepage show “Local” (not sure if just Beehaw or all instance). It’s true that it’d be good if the default was “All”, so discoverability isn’t fragmented.

All on the homepage? Strong disagree on that one, I’d rather subscribed was the default. It doesn’t really matter since it is easy to change it.
If I want to discover new things I can click all myself.
- Hah, yeah, that’s a good point. Right now (at least in Beehaw), it’s “Local” though, which feels like the worst of the three.

This is a nothing burger. Who cares if there's a hundred different cat instances. That's already what it was.

There can only be one orange cat instance? Give it a fucking break

I largely agree with you, there's already redundant subreddits and such.
But I think when we're trying to capture a ton of Reddit users, anything that represents a hurdle to new user adoption is a concern. That goes double for things that are intrinsic to the Fediverse that aren't intuitive to new users like myself.
- I'm think what you're feeling is not really the community duplication (although that's worse right now cause everything was dead 2w ago and there's almost no downside to making new communities cause almost nothing is well established), but rather the poor community discovery.
  One of the engines that drove the "natural" aggregation of users in the big subreddits is that when you searched for subreddits the big ones were at the top of the list. When you search on Lemmy, the big communities may not be on the list at all. But I think folks recognize this as a challenge and will work on it. This week is about keeping the lights on though.
- It's okay to not know something. We aren't born with perfect knowledge of subreddits. Reddit was just as confusing at first.
- We don't need to become reddit though, reddit is the problem. There is something about how it's structured that encourages toxicity. I would be more concerned about keeping these communities positive and welcoming. We don't need to make it inviting to all of reddit... I'm sure I'm not the only one that would rather see hurdles for entry than open floodgates for the kind of stuff that was making even the nicest and sanest of people into crazy assholes. My outlook has completely changed since leaving that cesspool and I'm actually horrified by how nihilistic it had made me. The world is a mess but reddit is worse.
I see your point. I browse all from world and I seem to be able to see everything anyway so who cares. I'll see all the cat pics no matter where they're posted. I rarely ever looked at my subbed feed on reddit anyway as it was all just food so I'd rather just see people post and I'll pick and chose what to click on.
Exactly, and natural selection will do the rest.

I guess rather than just silently creating a community and waiting for anyone to come, you'd have to make a post putting a light on your community. Although if you don't have the moderators to run a community, that might be jumping the gun to early.
There's at least a community for highlighting/requesting new communities here on /c/newcommunities@lemmy.world
(Okay I'm having some trouble figuring out how to link a community on jerboa)

I don't think this is a problem. It's the same on reddit where you can have multiple gaming subreddits or multiple news subreddits. Eventually the communities will consolidate.

But it is a problem even with Reddit.
At least for me many topics that I follow have several related subs and I often end up going through all of them individually to get a good overview and see different takes on news etc. With Reddit having the Other discussions tab helps a lot, but I guess that would be technically more difficult to implement in Lemmy.
IMHO both would benefit from having a way to combine different feeds under user defined categories. How things actually work under the hood wouldn't need to be changed, it would just be an UI feature that effects how the communities are presented to the user.
- Doesn't Reddit have multireddits? Lemmy can implement the same feature.
  OP mentioned this.

My proposed solution to this issue is a way to group subscribed channels. Like if I sub to x number of Games communities I wish I could drop them all in a folder labeled Games so I could browse all of those posts in one spot.

UI would be like Communities -> Subscribed (All) -> "Individual" folder hierarchy containing w/e you want.

yes, basically the same thing as multireddits?
I used that feature heavily on reddit and would love a way to group similar communities into buckets so I can browse each group independently of other groups
I think this is the obvious (and much needed) solution and will be something that the clients are going to implement at some point. Maybe with the option to merge similar posts, it could (occasionally) be fun to have the option to see all the comments from different communities with different viewpoints in one go.
It's something that would be useful even in something like Reddit where the sub fragmentation is much less of an issue.

Here is an issue that would solve this, but ideas are welcome.

This is exactly what i want

The first site to figure this out def has the biggest chance of being “the one” right now

Depends on if there will be a "big one" or even if there should be (after all, the point of this whole system is to not have all eggs in one basket no?). IMO there should be some sort of tag functionality across all instances and some sort of UI that just simply shows you all instances under this tag as if they were one (with the option to filter them out for yourself). Something like that perhaps.
- Or the ability to ‘subscribe to the top 5 communities by user count’ on a specific topic like, “Technology” or “Pics” or “Aww”

Oh man, it's going to be so much fun to have to group similar communities when there are hundreds of instances! 🙃

this is still easier than having a bookmark list of 40 forums.
- I think keeping up to date with 40 web forums would actually be easier and less confusing than doing the same with 40 Lemmy instances.

I would love for instances focused on their own topics. mandra.xyz is all about science and exploration. The only reason we dont have a gaming focused instance is that we simply havent done it

I'm on lemmy.world because it's federated with everything else as far as I know. Something like that would be good if you are ONLY interested in those topics. Otherwise you have to log onto another instance. I had signed up for several different instances and realized world is the best fit for me since I just like to browse random stuff. But yeah if you're just interested in say fishing and thats all, then that makes sense.
- can't you login to lemmy.world, then go join communities on gamingfocus.xyz and still be logged in?
  That seems to be how it works for me if I go to communities on the beehaw.org instance. You just change the community search from local to all.
- it's not fedded with burggit.moe for some reason

I think a good solution would be to split popular communities across instances to balance the load on the servers. Also you could have stubs that say the community is actually located at xyz etc.

Also in the description of each community they could update it to add links to the other communities on other instances so that people can subscribe to them as well. Though that'll make more work for mods to update it, and for users to actually connect to new ones as they pop up.

in b4 the meta "redundant posts about redundant communities across the fediverse" 🙃

I also would love to know the answer to this.

Maybe some functionality could be added to enable redirecting your local instance community to the more popular one? Is there any downside to something like that?

@bfr0 There were also multiple gaming communities within reddit, lets face it. Can't herd people all into one place even if there's only one website they'll find a way to schism