Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice?
Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
people having to subscribe to both to see the content
posters having to crosspost to both
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.
There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.
A cool feature would be an opt in community federation.
So two aligned communities on different instances can "friend" each other and will be synonymous.
If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.
This would require content addressing to be robust. It's what bluesky's atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).
A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.
This is the best answer that we should strive towards. Deduplication and community combining. Deduplication is hard but a lot of other places have been attempting it for years so methods have already come a long way. Community combining could be done through partnered aggregation and tagging of communities
No, this would be just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, a single monolithic social media website. That one instance would have higher running costs, and also greater power and influence and would be able to shape the narrative on controversial issues.
It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.
@theKalash
> Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single one
I'm confused by this. I'll admit I haven't used Lemmy much yet, but I thought communities do exist across all servers? So if I join "c/fediverse" on any one server, and you join "c/fediverse" on any other server, we're joining the same community. Is that not how it works?
I think this is just another variant of FOMO.
You don't need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that's it 🤷♂️
I'm not sure it's FOMO. The main issue I see is that communication to the audience (in this case, everyone interested in the Fediverse) is either cumbersome for the poster, or lacking for the audience.
I usually see people not knowing about some tool for Lemmy (link the instance link switcher or the account sync app) because it was posted on one community, and not the other they are following.
I agree, trying to get used to Lemmy and the amount of shit posts and low quality content can be fatiguing. Compound that with servers limiting people who can create accounts (lemmy.ml for instance) and inconsistent features for filtering/blocking memes and shit post communities on servers you don't have an account on— it's hard to get used to the disorganized mess.
Reddit thrived on consistent leadership within it's communities, if you didn't like one you could create another with clear access/visibility to the rest of the user base. If Reddit is an echo chamber, Lemmy seems to be doubly so.
Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.
I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
I'm subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it's a bit annoying. But it's also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don't, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
This seems to be an issue we should probably discuss, as it may prevent growth of the platform if most of the new joiners face it.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
Not trying to be mean, but ... you're making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D
In these other posts, a frequent answer is: Reddit isn't that much different. A popular example is /r/gaming or /r/games or whatever. Apparently there are multiple subs for the same topic, sometimes with little to no differences.
Then some people object "but that's not the same, they have different names", to which others reply "on lemmy, the full name includes the instance, so we don't have same name communities here, either".
I think, bottom line, the two platforms aren't very different in this regard. On both, users can create new subs/comms even if the exact same content already exists. And they do. Sometimes both survive, sometimes not. On both, users decide "with their feet".
One relevant difference might be that in the Fediverse, redundancy actually has value. It protects against defederation, unstable servers, servers disappearing.
I still see value in combining duplicates. When I see a new community popping up, and I know a very similar thing already exists, I might leave a note in the new community wether they might want to participate in the other community instead. Just in case they were not aware it exists.
But aside from the Fediverse-specific reasons for duplicates, there are additional general reasons, which is why we see the same phenomenon on reddit. For example, people might dislike the moderation in the 'original'. Or one might allow bots, the other not.
While this is my point of view ("it's a non-issue"), I also note it's a topic which is frequently brought up. Apparently, it's frequently seen as an issue. This may be rooted in perception (including the fact that reddit is monolithic, falsly leading to the misconception it would only have one sub for one topic, all while it still has plenty of redundant duplicates) and communication (I got the feeling the fediverse's federated structure is sometimes over-emphasized and creates more worries than necessary).
We probably will get technical solutions like grouping on a user-view level. Maybe some apps already have that. GitHub issues exist.
Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet. It is of course perfectly fine to address and re-address the topic. This might help consolidate similar communities. Personally, I think having a few redundant communities is healthy for the nature of the fediverse.
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I find this to be more positive than negative. The tone of the entire comment section tends to be set by the first few comments meaning every post has a high risk of becoming it's own tiny echo chamber. Spreading comments across multiple communities makes it more likely that the discussion will explore different aspects of the topic and that different opinions on the topic will be explored.
I don't think this matters. If they are defederated from an instance you post in, then they determined that they don't want to see what gets posted there. Why is it so important to reach everyone?
(To be fair, I think you should be able to post the same thing 10 times if you really want to, I just wish the site I use had a feature that would just automatically pool all posts with identical headings or links into a single post, then treat it like a mini community/magazine.)
The way i handle this is to sub to the biggest community on a given topic i can find. The exception to this is if i find a smaller community that is more active.
I feel like it's more of a client issue than a Lemmy issue. We could imagine having clients that correctly support crossposting by having tabs for each comment section.
Or alternatively, all the comments across them should be visible in-line in all communities.
Either of these approaches gives the agency to users to only reply to one of the cross post and read all the opinions/thoughts on that post. At the same time, it maintains the federation philosophy by not taking a community about a topic down, if the instance fails.
It would be very beneficial to have clients that support aggregating equivalent communities from multiple instances. When viewing a post from the aggregated community there could be a section at the top saying "Viewing comments from:" and then a dropdown to choose between "all instances", "lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml", etc. When viewing all comments, they would be in one combined feed, without the user needing to care about which underlying post holds the specific thread they're looking at.
Similarly, when users post something to an aggregate community, they could select whether it's posted to all the included communities, only one, or some specific subset.
Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice.
Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation.
That's exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.
I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.
Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
With all the defederation going on nowadays I'm happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn't participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.
But that's the issue, it's not because there is another version of the community that exists on a different server that people will rediscuss there what they already talked about on the main community, especially with the current low number of users.
I envision what you're asking as kinda like IRC. Everyone on the same network (Lemmy) can join the same channel (community) and would be some sort of sync feature for when defederation/instance vanishes (netsplit) happens to re-sync everyone. This would require some sort of trust cert/key or something from each community that wanted to join the conjoined version, as well as to validate they are still the correct community and not a bad actor.
Not sure how moderation and communities that wanted to leave the whole would be handled though.
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
After this needless, patronizing comment I lost interest in discussing the subject with you.
Subscribing to a multireddit as a community being implemented and promoted as a default experience may solve it. Idk if it should be on Lemmy's or client's side, but different communities forming a community-verse that's subscribable with one tap is, for me, the next stage of fediverse. If they are federated and cache each other, it should be possible to form a united feed. Best case, if you can make just a link combining them into one, so it's easy to share. It would fulfill this task without multiposting.
Browsing porn, for once, doesn't really work for me. On Reddit, I did a multi of things I enjoy to combine them, and switch to it without changing accounts. Now I either browse All-feed of porno instance seeing things I'm not into or go to exact user or community. It's far from what I enjoyed previously. And autorepost bots don't help it too.
IDing and combining posts into one is not fixing the problem, but covering it under a rug. The best case is to eradicate the very need to post the same meme, article or nude into two communities and then ban spammy accs. At least that's what I wish for.