For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes. I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the pa...

I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

  • willya@lemmyf.ukEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I disagree and think it’s fine how it is. I suppose if two want to link that would be fine but you might as well shut one down and move everyone over. People will always flock to whatever’s the more popular one. This could also flip with a competing community with better ideals/moderation/thoughts for engagement. I don’t see how lumping them all together really helps anything.

    This definitely isn’t the biggest issue.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I’ve already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it’s good that the badness of that “solution” is acknowledged.

    As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that’s what webrings are for! Let’s bring them back from the '90s. Basically get’s give the power of “static search” back to the users.

    Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I’m wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I’m mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
      0·
      1 年前

      The third solution wouldn’t cause extra communication. If you’re subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That’s the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.

      If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.

      I’m assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn’t explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn’t mean you can’t maintain similar communities without merging them.

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.

        Oh that’s a very good point! I had the wrong impression there was extra data sharing needed in this case but yeah, looking back it makes sense that the amount of data transfer is about the same considering the focus is on the verb (actor A sends to / pulls from actor B) rather on who is doing the action.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    Once I thoroughly understand Lemmy’s functionality through the Sublinks Re-implementation (since Rust is like Greek to me but Java I know), I want to try and put in a community tag feature that would be able to assemble a feed of communities across the Fediverse dedicated to one topic.

    I may take me 6 months to a year if I commit to it, but I do think some community aggregation mechanism like that is sorely missing from Lemmy and could help distribute post load better while ensuring a userbase on non-general topics remain active.

      • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        I’m not a software engineer by trade so no guarantees, but I’ve been wanting to improve it in some way. I still have yet to understand how Lemmy works, but from using Lemmy I’ve identified two big areas that could use improvement:

        Community Tags: Mods being able to tag communities on topics for better aggregation of related communities.

        Post Flairs: Users/Mods being able to assign a flair to a post for better client-side filtering of posts, from either a pre-defined list or freeform based on community preference.

        For ActivityPub compatibility purposes, either of these could potentially be analogous to Mastodon hashtags, but I still have yet to decide on how that would work especially without it becoming tumblr level.

  • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    What about the (non) fictitious problem when you have several (similar) communities dedicated to the same topic on the same instance? What then?

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      Same solutions apply. They don’t have to be across different instances to be able to group them somehow.

  • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.

    About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.

    Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that’s fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that’s okay.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      , but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.

      [citation needed]

      I don’t see any community that has been mechanically, forcibly moved over to another instance. I can still post to !cats@a.net and !cats@b.xyz separately.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:

      I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.

      • stown@sedd.itEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        Id say that the obvious answer is the Linux community with the most members. !linux@lemmy.ml has more than double the number of subscribers of the next most active Linux community.

        • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
          0·
          1 年前

          Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation

          It makes me feel like I should be making the post to multiple communities, but then I feel like I’m spamming

            • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              0·
              1 年前

              The PDev version is better anyway.

              I have a few communities that are still on .ml, I forgot you guys were defederated, maybe I should move them elsewhere

          • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            0·
            1 年前

            Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation

            Hopefully defederation will happen less and less with 19.X allowing users to block instances themselves

            • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
              0·
              1 年前

              Yeah I think there needs to be more options though, for admins and for users. Like conditional caching or proxying of images from other instances.

              And not just blocking instances but choosing to block all the users from an instance without blocking their communities, or only blocking their comments not their posts. Also admins should be able to set default blocks that all the users get but can change individually

          • stown@sedd.itEnglish
            0·
            1 年前

            Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about what they are saying.

            • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              1 年前

              Literally spoken as a leftist who has gotten bans for not being a Maoist bootlicker. My accounts with this name across multiple instances are the on a short leash for daring to question ML dogma.

              • stown@sedd.itEnglish
                0·
                1 年前

                If you don’t insert politics into normal conversations and you value relationships more than you value being right (left) then this should not be an issue.

                Stay away from the political communities and don’t feel like you need to correct people when they spout out political bullshit.

          • stown@sedd.itEnglish
            0·
            1 年前

            You don’t need an account on lemmy.ml to subscribe to any community there. For example, I run my own self-hosted instance and none of the communities I’m subscribed to are from my own instance.

      • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        In this case, it’s the first, which is obvious based on the number of subscribers and active users. You don’t even need a third party tool, it’s literally in the sidebar

  • spaduf@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I’m personally of the mind that we should be imagining a world where all 3 of these solutions are at play. 1 is absolutely the most important, and Admins should be taking an active role here where possible (particularly as it relates to dead community cleanup). I personally think they are the missing element needed to negotiate these sorts of consolidations. 2 and 3 on the other hand are pretty simple features and even if Lemmy never takes it on, I think it’s reasonable that any one of the new fediverse link aggregators could take this up. The only other thing I’ll say is multi-communities absolutely must be sharable. Ideally, it should even be possible to link multi-communities with the “!” syntax or similar.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      1 is absolutely the most important,

      1 is literally the worst of the three, opening the Fediverse to a death at the hands of corporate. And I’ve already explained its other issues.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I don’t think it’s a huge issue, there were often multiple communities for the same thing on reddit

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that needing your comments mirrored perfectly everywhere in every community comes off as a bit:

    1. Obsessive / Compulsive

    2. Narcissistic

    I don’t need to be involved in every conversation about the subjects I’m interested in, and I don’t need everyone in every community to see what I have to say, and having problems with things not being that way, well… It just comes off as very weirdly self-focused.

    I mean, this is no different than reddit having millions of subreddits and having multiple posts of the same article in many different ones, with many different conversations.

    Also, didn’t we learn any lessons from Reddit? Like making each community as big as possible means the community becomes less of a community and more of a chore? It’s asking for Eternal September to happen more quickly, by shoving everyone in the same box as fast as possible.

    The fact that there’s a bunch of splintered, smaller communities is actually what I like about Lemmy.

    All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.

    Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      Obsessive and narcissistic because there are many duplicate communities and it’s frustrating to try and find out which ones to use? Okay…

      All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.

      Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.

      It just sounds like you didn’t read the post and made up a narrative in your head about what it’s about.

  • Landsharkgun@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a ‘problem’? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.

    • Blaze@discuss.onlineEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      People are pushing for it because they see the amount of people here as a finite number that shouldn’t be spread too thin.

      I’m more on the side advocating to get more people here so that we don’t worry about how many communities we have on the same topic

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I really don’t think this is a major problem for Lemmy. Users won’t find the proper community and leave Lemmy, or what’s the idea here?

    I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
      0·
      1 年前

      I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.

      This problem is part of why there’s not enough activity. Any activity that happens in the threadiverse is spread across multiple, duplicate communities. That makes it harder for communities to build up active userbases and makes users themselves less likely to post or comment.

      • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        In theory yes, but everyone posts to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml, so I haven’t seen this becoming a practical problem myself.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      You didn’t read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I’m not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      I hope they can revisit the idea. There are many cases of duplicate communities splintering the community, making finding content more difficult.

      • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        Do you have an example? Because all the evidence shows that people want to be seen when they post, and will naturally gravitate towards the most active communities, except if they are against the instance the most active community is.

        • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
          0·
          1 年前

          Because all the evidence shows…

          What evidence shows that? This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.

          You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I’m subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn’t happen.

          • Blaze@discuss.onlineEnglish
            0·
            1 年前

            What evidence shows that?

            The merge of the cooking communities I shared with you in another comment: https://lemmy.world/post/7578470

            This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.

            Didn’t find it in https://kbin.social/m/fediverse nor in any other community except lemmy.ml (2 comments)

            Don’t you think that we pretty much consolidated around fediverse.world?

            For Linux, the main one is !linux@lemmy.ml.

            For movies, the most active is !moviesandtv@lemm.ee, there is also !movies@lemmy.world, but it’s getting less and less active, so we’ll probably consolidate around the first one soon.

            Gaming is an interesting choice, there are a few of them, but each have their reasons of existing

            There are others, but the interesting aspect is in this case, every community has enough people to stay active.

            • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
              0·
              1 年前

              I don’t think we’ve consolidated around fediverse@lemmy.world. You’re using a single post as an example. I’ve posted links that got 40+ comments in fediverse@kbin.social but way less in other communities. I’ve posted or seen threads in fediverse@lemmy.ml that got more discussion.

              The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn’t sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I’d bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to cooking@lemmy.world anyway.

              What I’m talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren’t necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They’ll see communities they’re interested in and sub, but then won’t see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.

              Even if consolidation is happening, there’s a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find movies@a.com or movies@b.com but if they’re grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.

              • Blaze@discuss.onlineEnglish
                0·
                1 年前

                If you want an example of community consolidation between different servers, there is !unixporn@lemmy.ml and !unixporn@lemmy.world. Most of the activity if happening on lemmy.ml, and there was a backlash when the mods from the sub wanted to takeover the lemmy.world community. Both are still open, but someone who wants to post would see that the LW isn’t as active as the .ml, and post to the latter.

                About your point, there are two things at hand.

                First, the technical possibility of it happening. It has been linked elsewhere, the Lemmy devs are not interested in this. Kbin has it, somehow, but the userbase is now on Lemmy, and I don’t see it moving the Kbin/Mbin, except if they surpass Lemmy in features. Maybe sublinks will have this, we’ll see.

                But beyond the technical aspect, there is also the “political” aspect. People who don’t like communities on LW are not going to enjoy being forced to have their content shared to LW communities too. People who avoid Lemmy.ml due to the political stance of the users are also not going to be happy to discuss with the people they are trying to avoid.

                The point is that Lemmy has been around for some months now, people know each others, the other servers, and more or less where everyone stands. If people keep communities separated, there is a reason, and it’s not going to be solved by technical measures.

                • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
                  0·
                  1 年前

                  the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

                  I know. I’m the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn’t it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

                  there is also the “political” aspect

                  Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

                  Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

                  Your arguments against it seem to be:

                  1. Its not needed. - I’ve pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn’t happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don’t have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don’t know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you’ve centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
                  2. People might not want it - The proposal doesn’t force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities’ members.

                  I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that. Either the communities you’re in don’t join up with others or they do and you wouldn’t notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

  • noride@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I think the biggest issue for me with your proposal is any time a single pancake post is made, four communities now show recent activity and are likely to all show on everyone’s main feed.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      1 年前

      Ideally only one post would be made, no crossposts. One pancake post would be on your feed, and that same post would be visible from other communities

      • noride@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        Ahh, I think I got you. So, ideally, ‘followed’ content wouldn’t trigger recent activity within the ‘followers’ community? Is that the idea?

        • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
          0·
          1 年前

          Followed posts would just link to the original post and wouldn’t be a crosspost, yeah. So assuming a and b are following each other, a post from a would show up in b. If someone in b clicks on the post, they would just open the same post from a.

  • veee@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I think the multi-Reddit approach as the default would work best. Users subscribe to a “central” Group or Topic and immediately pull content from every federated community that self-designates as such.

    One problem with this is if the community changes their mind and turns into something else. Either they check a box and designate under another Group or Topic, or get unsubscribed by users manually.

    • Quokka@quokk.au
      English
      0·
      1 年前

      A lot of communities fracture due to bad mods.

      Grouping them all together kinda undoes that and become a clusterfuck.

      • veee@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        1 年前

        Grouping them wouldn’t mean merging them. For a lack of better terms a Group (multi-Reddit) would allow each indexed community to retain its independence.

        But I do see your point about bad mods. Leaving a rotten community in the index has the potential of making the group look bad. However, that’s where the beauty of federation comes into play where users can unsubscribe from those undesirable communities from the larger group.

  • HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 年前

    I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.