I still have no idea how Lemmy really works, and I had to sign up for this instance - I don’t know, I don’t see a platform growing on that. But maybe that’s the point. I’m trying to engage though! The Voyager app’s “import sub” feature from Reddit is brilliant.
Welcome here! Feel free if you have any questions
Custom feeds grouping similar communities
That was addressed in the article under Proposal 2:
it’s a feature not many people made use of, and it sounds like a pain to have to constantly create and manage new multi-communities to group together duplicate communities. This shouldn’t be a task that users have to manually do.
Personally I think proposal 2 and 3 should happen concurrently. Using the example in the post I would setup a custom feed (that can hopefully consolidate cross posts) for breakfast. I would put pancakes@a.com which subscribes to pancakemasters@b.com I can also add pancakeart@a.com and waffles@a.com. so when someone posts about the best homemade peanut butter syrup recipe that is cross posted to my pancake and waffle communities, I don’t get 4 posts about it, I can see it once and choose where to reply (pancakes obviously, I’m a waffle purist).
Community interlinking/subscription fixes a slightly different problem than custom feeds IMO. It’s a really good idea, but I would personally still want custom feeds (with the ability to handle crossposts in a customizable way).
It shouldn’t be difficult to group some community automatically then users can edit it if they want
How would automatic grouping work?
Even if the communities are grouped, a given post or comment would still show up in only one community, and people not using the grouped view wouldn’t see it. Proposal 3 would solve that issue.
If they are similar, why not consolidate?
Wouldn’t that go against decentralization?
No, it would not. In proposal 3, communities would still choose whether or not to follow each other, just like instances choose whether or not to federate with one another.
Decentralization is being able to access the same content from different instances.
Duplicating communities is the opposite: now people can’t see the same content, they have to follow all the similar communities
they have to follow all the similar communities
See, this compulsion needs to be killed off. Because no, they absolutely do not have to.
If a user wants to see all the activity on a given topic, they very much do have to.
Better to not have to start over 100% if the main community is on a server that randomly disappears forever or turns sour and gets defederated.
There is no community backup for those ones, they seem to be doing fine:
- !europe@feddit.org
- !fediverse@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !stardewvalley@lemm.ee
- !dach@feddit.org
- !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
- !france@jlai.lu
Instance shutting down is indeed a valid risk, but it shouldn’t be handled at the community level
!europe@feddit.org and !dach@feddit.org was formerly on the now closed feddit.de I think. It took me sometime to find them again…
Edit: I think a better solution is for us to custom group similar communities.
I’m glad you’ve been lucky enough to not lose any of your favorite communities. The server (tchncs.de) my user is currently on is my 3rd Lemmy provider to date. The other two just evaporated and took the communities I modded for with them. Thankfully the one I cared about already had a dupe - which is still going strong.
Part of the point of a meta community system (that could serve to consolidate and solve your problem) is that then all communities would be divorced from their hosts. Then (as an example), if the UK government pulled an Apple with feddit.uk and feddit suddenly shuttered to avoid it, those communities would/could be grafted on to another server, intact.
I’m glad you’ve been lucky enough to not lose any of your favorite communities.
I’ve lost !moviesandtv@lemmy.film when the instance shut down. I still advocate for one community.
Should lemm.ee go down, I would recreate the community elsewhere and post on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
I’ve rebuilt !moviesandtv@lemm.ee , now abandoned.
I’ve built !movies@lemm.ee. I can do it a fourth time.
Because each instance and community had it’s own rules. With custom feeds user can choose with communities he want to consolidate and separate them again if he want
What are the rules differences between !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@lemm.ee ?
!movies@lemmy.world allows shitposts/memes. It’s a big deal to some people like me
Ok my mistake but that is just one example. They may exists some two similar community with different rules. I constantly read people opinions on the fediverse selling point was about it being censorship resistant because you can switch to another instance
I constantly read people opinions on the fediverse selling point was about it being censorship resistant because you can switch to another instance
It is, but that’s an emergency measure, not a day to day basis
similar community with different rules.
In those cases, the communities should not consolidate, and would not “follow each other” under Proposal 3.
Because problems could arise by relying on a single community. Proposal 3 retains the duplicate communities while eliminating the problems that duplicate communities currrently cause.
Duplicates are a minor issue. That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
The problems with #3 are:
- Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
- Different comms have different rules, and in this situation rule enforcement becomes a mess.
There’s no good solution for that. On the other hand, the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links:
- a new user might not know which comms to follow, but they can simply copy a multi-comm from someone who does
- good multi-comms are organically shared by users back and forth
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover. Also note that the root issue is not exclusive to federated platforms, it pops up in Reddit too; it’s a consequence of users being able to create comms by themselves.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking
!pancakes@a.comwith a pinned thread like “go to!pancakes@b.com”.
This is a minor part of the text, but I feel in the mood to address it:
I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis
The same users who get “choice paralysis” from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who: can’t be arsed to check rules before posting, can’t be arsed to understand what someone else said before screeching, comment idiotic single-liners that add nothing but noise, whine “wah, TL;DR!” at anything with 100+ chars… because all those things backtrack to the same mindset: “thinking is too hard lol. I’m entitled to speak my empty mind, without thinking if I’m contributing or not lmao.”
Is this really the sort of new user that we old users want to welcome here? Growth is important, but unrestricted growth regardless of cost is cancer.
Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
Maybe I am not fully understanding your point here but from my point of view this is just not true?
A lot of the traffic is going to be on very general topics like “memes” or “technology” where posts are going to fit pretty much every other similar community.
Plus, in this case whoever has the authorities to follow communities can decide if the posts fit, so you’re not losing anything if posts from a more specific community like “wholesome memes” end up showing up in a more general “memes” community.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking
!pancakes@a.comwith a pinned thread like “go to!pancakes@b.com”.If you aren’t already the moderator of
n-1communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:- Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
- Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (difficult)
- Get people, many of whom are reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (sometimes impossible)
- Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the
n-1communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)
It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
Same experience here
That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover.
I respectfully disagree. In two minutes, I can easily find all the communities on a given topic and subscribe to them all. The problem is not discovery. The problem is fragmentation of the user base, as explained by popcar in their blog post:
Alright, time to post. But where?
pancakes@a.comandpancakes@c.comare both somewhat active… Should I post inaand crosspost toc? Maybe there’s hope in other communities kicking off again, should I crosspost tobanddas well? Oh no, am I going to post 4 times just to find my fellow pancake lovers?!Let me take this a bit further: After crossposting to all 4 pancake communities, I get three comments. One in
a,b, andd. Each comment is in a separate post and none of them interact with each other unless the poster opens each crosspost separately.I do not see how Proposal 2 (multi-communities) solves the issue of fragmentation of the user base, while Proposal 3 (communities following each other) solves this quite elegantly.
The same users who get “choice paralysis” from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who
I’m not so sure. I sometimes have choice paralysis again on a topic I’m not familiar with, and I’m sure quite a lot of other people do as well
I’m sure plenty exceptions exist - that’s why I said “typically”, it’s that sort of generalisation that applies less to real individuals and more to an abstract “typical user”.
@threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works , which is quite active as well, has a similar experience: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39248886/17090166
To me, choice paralysis happens to most of people, whatever their familiarity level with the platform. I would actually be worried if someone knew exactly where to post for any topic, because it would mean they probably just default to their home instance
I’ve personally developed my system as:
- If there are multiple communities, which is the most popular?
- If the most popular community is on a problematic instance, skip to the next most popular that is also on a good instance.
That takes away the paralysis, at least for me.
What do you do when there are two similarly active communities?
Hm, I can’t recall encountering that yet, but I can see how that would be a harder one to decide. I suppose I might cycle between them.
!android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id comes to mind
Post on the one with the most recent post.
Never thought about communities following communities. It actually makes a lot of sense and would solve the fragmentation issue in an elegant and “democratic” way.
If admins really bother doing it. A lot of communities are already dead with no active admins to follow others
This use case seems to be more for situations when you do have 2 more relatively active communities (with one being smaller).
Then why not consolidate?
Multicommunities are/grouping communities is being discussed in this issue atm:
Fully agree with solution three, federated communities is the way. Solution two is just dumb and is basically just the subbed feed
i literally just want it to work like it does on matrix: a room (community in this instance) is an independent thing that exists on all servers with users participating in it, and then each server can also assign aliases to the rooms (communities) like how we assign domain names to IP addresses, of which the room (community) admins can set one to be the main alias which is generally displayed in UIs.
so a community called “bagels stacked on dogs” could have aliases like #bagelsondogs:lemmy.chat, #bageldogs:lemmy.chat, #bagelsondogs:discuss.dogchat.com, #bagelson:dogs.net, etc etc and the community admins would of course want to set #bagelson:dogs.net to be the main way to reference the community.
IDK, man. It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones. And the benefit you get, for asking people to take literally a couple of minutes of effort to sort out how to get involved with some particular topic, is pretty significant.
I’m not trying to say not to make good solutions to it, but also, trying to make everything maximally easy carries a significant down side, in that it attracts people who want to put minimal effort into everything (including their posts and their interactions with others once they’ve arrived on the network.)
I’d say it also turns off people who have expertise in other areas and would chime if there wasn’t so many hurdles.
Say an astrophysicist wants to connect with the community. Do you think they want to take time out of their day to learn the intricacies of a tool that otherwise has no use to them? Do you think they should have to?
This will inevitably keep this community gated from having a diverse userbase that Reddit has had at its peak.
There are only so many of us posting here.
The day we get 10 different people posting about quite popular topics like movies, then sure. But having the current split while there are 5 people posting for the entire platform seems counterproductive.
Another example I have is !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !privacy@programming.dev. Both communities have similar rules, instances are similar, everything is similar.
There is one poster there that seems to prefer the programming.dev one, so I have to crosspost everything they post to the dbzer0 one so that people subbed to that one don’t miiss anything.
!movies@lemmy.world is a bit similar. It’s mostly a one-person show (rough estimation, 80% of the posts are one person), but they wouldn’t move to !movies@lemm.ee, while we have discussion posts, active mods, everything.
So sure, it’s not that hard, but it doesn’t mean that people will do it.
I think I just see the problem as a little different than “how can we make things easy for people.” A lot of modern web design is “make it as easy as possible,” but I don’t think that actually always leads to the best experience. I really liked the take that the video I posted has on it.
If I had to describe the underlying problems with Lemmy, they would include things like “How do we stop anonymous accounts from being obnoxious” or “How can we put more of the control of people’s experience in their own hands, instead of having moderators being able to ‘override’ a consenting communication between two people who want to have it.” Both of those, I feel like, may actually involve making things harder for the average user to come onboard and figure out what’s going on, or navigate the system effectively. But then if they’re able to overcome that (honestly, pretty modest) obstacle, the end result is better. In my view that is ok. There’s other stuff than just making it easy.
That’s another improvement area indeed, but not thar related to choice paralysis linked to parallel similar communities existing
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results. If there are multiple active communities, that’s not an issue, and there’s no real reason to homogenize them behind lizard brain FOMO. If there’s one active community and 6 dead ones, there’s no reason for users to find any of the dead ones.
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here.
This I absolutely would agree with. An option to hide communities that haven’t gotten at least X amount of activity recently, so you can find them if you want to, but there’s some kind of indication whether it’s programming@super.active.place or programming@crickets x5 that you want to access, sounds great.
https://lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film still gets posted to while the instance has been gone for around 2 years
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization
No, it’s just consolidation of activity to a sustainable level.
Consolidation happened in the past
Those communities have no active counterpart, are they a threat to decentralization?
Those communities have no active counterpart, are they a threat to decentralization?
Yes, they are. The case of the last one is exemplar: there was a similar community elsewhere, which had grown organically from people recreating the same name Reddit sub in the manner it was over 10 years ago (memes, people talking about their real life, news); it was by far the most followed of several similar communities. Then mods/admins of a more recent instance infiltrated the successful community and convinced existing mods to shut the main community down and move to the one on that new instance. Now all that is left is selected news and orientated propaganda. The modus operandi is to bring or recreate all communities in this language to their own instance, so that they can apply their own rules on them, whereas they had zero power over the other ones. If an outside community is in zombie state, they have no interest into reviving it (it would just requires posting to generate a regular trafic, and after a while waking up a sleeping mod or request its replacement), but they are going to create the equivalent on their instance, it will probably go zombie too after un short moment since they have no interest in the subject, they just want to exert control.
There is a reason why on Usenet, parallel hierarchies (typically alt.*) came up to life beside the more successful big 8 and national hierarchies. Even in BBS time, BBSs often subscribed to 2 or 3 networks offering conferences on duplicate subjects, one was more popular than the other, but so what? There is a need for several communities on the same subject, even if one is more popular than the others; it allows people who are banned (or simply harassed or shunned) from community A to go to B and those who are banned or feeling unwelcome on B to go to A. It is the same with regular Web forums: when you get pissed at people or the mod/admin has it in for you on server A, you make an account on server B. With web forums, I have witnessed a special case and its consequences: a clique of the same 2 or 3 persons managed to infiltrate moderation on both existing large forums on the subject, and therefore could silence any other opinion than theirs. That’s the same issue as with concentration/centralisation, whether you call it consolidation or another name. It is better to keep several communities alive: even if their trafic is very scarce, there are always lurkers already present, and it is easier to revive/vivify them that way than starting from scratch as a 1-man effort, often with no way to advertise it, while the main community still lives.
Yes, they are. The case of the last one is exemplar: there was a similar community elsewhere, which had grown organically from people recreating the same name Reddit sub in the manner it was over 10 years ago (memes, people talking about their real life, news); it was by far the most followed of several similar communities. Then mods/admins of a more recent instance infiltrated the successful community and convinced existing mods to shut the main community down and move to the one on that new instance. Now all that is left is selected news and orientated propaganda.
Hey,
It seemed familiar but I had to check. We redirected from !france@lemmy.world to !france@jlai.lu as Lemmy.world was having a lot of technical trouble at the time, and also because it was nicer to have an instance in French.
The memes still exist on !rance@jlai.lu or !actu_memes@jlai.lu. Discussions moved to !forumlibre@jlai.lu
There is !jeuxvideo@jlai.lu , !musique@jlai.lu even !artsdufil@jlai.lu or !interessant@jlai.lu
There are other France communities around, the most active one recently being !france@sh.itjust.works. There is also !neofrance@lemmy.world and !actualite@lemmy.world but you said you found news boring.
What prevents you from creating !france@lemm.ee and use it to grow your own version of the community?
Edit: I was also the second mod of !france@lemmy.world. There was no infiltration.
Then mods/admins of a more recent instance infiltrated the successful community and convinced existing mods to shut the main community down and move to the one on that new instance. Now all that is left is selected news and orientated propaganda.
There’s something I don’t get in this scenario: why didn’t anyone ask the mods of the old community to reopen it, to act as an alternative to the new community?
Another case in hand is the 196 story
- !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone mods wanted to move the community to !196@lemmy.world without asking the community first
- A bunch of members organized and created !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone. They posted about it on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and other meta communities, allowing people to join on the new community while avoiding potential censorship from the original mods
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone is now by far the most of the three communities. It showed that having the option to reorganize elsewhere is good, but also that usually people will just consolidate on one community.
What prevented a similar reaction in your scenario?
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.
The “merging” in Proposal 3 would be mutually opt-in by community moderators, not forced.
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results.
Who gets to determine if a community is dead or not? That seems like a form of centralization.
It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones
Everyone will be different, but I can attest that these types of decisions do slow my workflow down:
- Which communities could I post to?
- Are there any communities my instance hasn’t federated with yet? (Check Lemmyverse.net)
- Should I post to all of the communities?
- Just post to the most subscribed or most active?
- Post to the smallest and crosspost to the larger ones?
This can take more than just “a couple minutes”, and I’m pretty sure I am in the minority of users, even on Lemmy, who are willing to put in the effort.
Proposal 3 in the article seems to be an elegant solution which also does not give a single community all of the power.
Yeah, I’m all for making stuff smooth with these different proposals, I didn’t mean it to sound like I was not. I was just saying that making things easy is not always the best or most valuable of the goals.
I quite agree with the issue described and I 100% agree it’s a critical one but, because none of the proposed solution seem to be ideal, I’m also wondering if this doesn’t end up saying the right model, right in the sense that it will work with/feel much more simpler to most users, is a centralized system and not a federated one?
is a centralized system
So… Reddit? With the cancelled third-party apps, the visible ads, the ads hiding as posts, the powertripping mods (but unpaid as well), the algorithm trying to get the most “engagement” by showing hateful content?
So… Reddit?
I don’t know, I just shared agut feeling while reading the OP. And I’m not saying it’s what we should thrive for, just sharing that gut feeling about what, like I said, I consider a critical issue on Lemmy.
With the cancelled third-party apps, the visible ads, the ads hiding as posts, the powertripping mods (but unpaid as well), the algorithm trying to get the most “engagement” by showing hateful content?
That’s a whole other discussion imho. But if you want to discuss about that:
- I only talked about a centralized system (aka, a unified one) and, once again, I did not say it was the solution only that it felt like that while I was reading the post. As far as I know, centralization does not imply the obligation to rely on algorithm (and ads, paywalls, or nothing dirty like that).
- As far as mods abusing their power is an issue (it is), I think we do have a few on Lemmy too. Isn’t there a community dedicated to that issue?
- Ditto for the ‘hateful content’ (and I would add the extremely low effort posts too), it was a pain on Reddit, it’s a pain on Lemmy too there is just of it on Lemmy because there are less of us posting ;)
I consider the Reddit default home page an insult to any half-working brain but I would not be much more sympathetic to Lemmy’s default feed either. I remember we briefly discussed that already: I’d rather see an empty feed by default, with only a short-ish selection of very broad categories the user would pick from to start seeing content that they’re interested in. And only that content, not all the crap. They would then be able to start fine tuning their selection. Something like that. - Reducing Reddit to what you listed here would be… unfair to the great content and great discussion one can easily find over there. As an ex-Reddit user, after an adaptation time (learning how to get rid of the default crap feed and how to remove the crap ads, learning what subs were better ignored) I had a great time using Reddit (and that is despite its poor UI). I did not quit using it because of the flow of hate or the flow of moronic content, nor because of abusive mods (quite the opposite, I appreciated their work… thx to fine selection of the few subs I was subscribed to). I did not quit reddit for that, no more than I would quit Lemmy for those flaws either. I left because I hated how Reddit, the corporation, took hold of our content and started restricting access to our content in order to negotiate deals with partners. And started talking about paywalling some of it. I briefly explained it as a last post on my Reddit profile and I close the door behind me.
But I do miss those interesting discussions I had, and I miss a few subs too (r/Simpleliving, would be the first one I would mention).
If I was not admitting I miss that I would be a liar. - I also find it difficult to motivate/encourage more people to join and participate here on Lemmy because I’m myself constantly faced with the ‘messy’ aspects of Lemmy. I’m stubborn and I decided I could live with them (happily) but I also know many people are not ok with that and it’s unlikely they ever will.
Hence me agreeing with the OP: Lemmy being as fragmented as it is is a critical issue.
Hence, the second part of my comment: it feels to me that the only easy/obvious solution is to rely on a centralized system. I’m not saying it’s what should be done (I would not be part of the fediverse if I had no desire to see an alternative to that centralization). I may be wrong in that, most probably I’m (I have no technical expertise) but it still is what I felt while reading the post. Nothing more.And for the rest, let the downvoters enjoy their very own moment of power ;)
. I left because I hated how Reddit, the corporation, took hold of our content and started restricting access to our content in order to negotiate deals with partners.
But how do you prevent this from happening if the content is centralized?
Let’s imagine there’s only one lemmy.net
Once we reach a big enough population (not a given, Discuit is still doing 210 weekly active users) , a company comes in, makes the owners an offer they can’t refuse, and they do what you criticize in your previous comment
But how do you prevent this from happening if the content is centralized?
I have no idea and like (I think) I said, I’m not even sure that’s an option we should consider. It’s just it feels likes there is this path circling back to centralization and that makes me wonder.
Once we reach a big enough population (not a given, Discuit is still doing 210 weekly active users) , a company comes in, makes the owners an offer they can’t refuse, and they do what you criticize in your previous comment
That’s why I (want to) believe in the fediverse. If something like that were to happen and that’s also why I’m not sure centralization is a solution.
it feels to me that the only easy/obvious solution is to rely on a centralized system
What are your thoughts on Proposal 3?
See my answer to your other comment below ;)
the right model, right in the sense that it will work with/feel much more simpler to most users, is a centralized system and not a federated one?
How is Proposal 3 not a federated model? Communities would choose to mutually share posts with each other.
Well, merging communities means trying to reduce the number of alternative communities on the same topic, or did I miss something?
But, like I said, I’m not saying it is not doable. I’m only sharing how I felt reading the OP post.
Well, merging communities means trying to reduce the number of alternative communities on the same topic, or did I miss something?
No, that’s Proposal 1. Proposal 3 means retaining a number of alternative communities on the same topic while syncing posts and comments between them.
Oh, I did not get that. That’s an interesting idea. Would still need to solve the ‘where’ do I post (which for many seems to also mean ‘to what Instance do I belong’), and then how do one moderate content from various communities, from posters that may or may not adhere to one’s own rules. It won’t be obvious but I would be more than willing to see something like being experimented, even if it’s to decide it’s too complex, it seems worth at least an attempt, imho.
Would still need to solve the ‘where’ do I post
Proposal 3 makes that a non-issue. If
pancakes@a.comandpancakes@b.comfollow each other, a user can post to either community and their post will show up on both communities, with a shared comments section.I don’t foresee significant moderation challenges, but if any unresolvable issues did come up, communities could simply unfollow each other and go back to being separate communities.
Thank you @popcar2@programming.dev
Oh hey, it’s been a while since I’ve written this. Thanks for sharing it again. When I posted it last year to the fediverse community, people were not ready for it.
Excellent write-up of the problem and its potential solutions!
Do you know if Proposal 3 has made it to the Lemmy devs? If so, what was their response to it?
I haven’t checked since making this post but when the idea was floating around the devs said they preferred multi-communities (proposal 2). That’s still on the Lemmy roadmap but isn’t here yet.
That said, Piefed apparently implemented something similar to proposal 3 so maybe the devs can change their mind and copy them instead.
Piefed apparently implemented something similar to proposal 3
Have they? Blaze linked to a thread on the implementation of Piefed “feeds”, which is a form of Proposal 2 (multi-communities). Have they also implemented Proposal 3 (communities following each other) as well?
I really hope the devs consider Proposal 3, as it seems like the solution which best fixes fragmentation.
I guess the confusion comes from the fact that Piefed feeds can be followed by other people, so it’s a bit more than “just” proposal 2. But yes, it’s not full proposal 3 either.
The issue of multiple communities is the same as reddit. Lemmy lacks the volume of users for the level of niches people are sometimes interested in. A post about pancakes does not need a specialized niche on a platform with limited total active users.
The regular daily users on Lemmy are likely not using subscription feeds very much if at all. Those that are less regular are likely using these features more, but they are far less likely to discover new communities.
In my opinion, there is a disconnect with people that expect Lemmy to mirror other platforms 1:1 or nearly. This perspective is lacking an understanding of the scale of the user base. Building hyper niche communities and expecting them to grow organically out of a vacuum is a fallacy. Communities must grow as branches of a tree where they are born out of a strong base community.
This is where bad moderation is a massive problem. We need loosely defined, liberally moderated, strong general communities first. These must have minimal rules and mostly passive moderation so that you know c/food is a safe place to post anything about your pancakes even if it is a pancake with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham. You should know that c/food is a place where even your odd pancake will get some love and motivate you to share whatever heinous pastry topping atrocity you make in the asylum kitchen next week. /s
Bad mods that are overactive and largely narcissistic are in my opinion the largest problem on Lemmy. There is nothing hard about being a mod. The community does all of the real work of flagging issues because the community ultimately is all that matters. The rules are guidelines. Flags need to be handled with care and depth. Just because someone flags something that does not mean they are correct. I’ve flagged some stuff that was poorly explained and ineffective, where only admin could have seen what I was talking about. I’ve also seen a few where the person flagging is the underlying problem. There is certainly need to weed out bigots and I’m not for harming anyone. There are places where heavy moderation is important and needed, but that kind of mindset bleeds into the periphery too much here IMO.
As a user, I don’t want authoritarian stupidity and narcissistic nonsense. I like having options for posting in other parallel communities when I see some community has a dozen pedantic rules. I will just post in the more obscure place that is not so narcissistic and anti community in the big picture perspective.
While I appreciate having those obscure options, I think it is a MAJOR fallacy to allow narcissistic mods to continue in any community but especially large and high participation communities. Mods do not matter. No one has ever made a post or comment because they checked who the mods are and used that information as a reason for posting or commenting. They post because of the way the place intuitively resonates, if it seems like a safe place, and because of the social democratic participation within the space. The only community that can be owned by a mod is the one where the mod is the only person that has ever posted. If you do not agree with this, you are ultimately a fascist authoritarian, whether you can see and acknowledge that is not my problem. Communities are a de facto democracy when multiple users post within them. The mod does not own these users, their posts, or the comments. The mod is only a custodian; a janitor. The mod comes last. The mod is a servant, not a leader. Anyone making forced posts is doing more harm than good. Some people are really great at finding good content and posting regularly. This role is not tied to the implications and responsibilities of being a mod. This convolution of participation and moderation is the primary issue at the largest scale of abstraction that goes unaddressed in the link aggregation platform format and remains outside of collective awareness. The convolution of the mod role in abstract, masks emotional investment and fixation of narcissists, and that leads to harmful actions towards well intentioned users and purging of any difference in opinion that evokes a negative emotion from an underlying authoritarian or egomaniacal person. The resultant actions cull true diversity of perspectives and conversational depth in an extremest like feedback loop. When users participate in good faith and receive mob like negativity, it is bad for Lemmy growth. However, when good faith participation results in mod actions it causes disenfranchisement on another level and often leads to short or long term migration off of the platform.
A moderator should have a better ethical foundation. We are all humans. We are all often wrong, or misunderstood. Still, in these instances, as a human you have a right to exist. We all have bad days or overreact with our emotions at times. Yet still, you have a right to exist. Some of us are compromised in various ways that may require a measure of empathy kindness and understanding that the average person in the community is not capable of understanding by default due to outlier circumstance. The person may be depressed, abused, in isolation, or neurodivergent in various ways. These are especially vulnerable to harm from a narcissistic mod. In some of these cases, disenfranchisement from negative interaction may directly contribute to real world harm and even death through indirect means. For this reason, all moderator actions MUST be considered harmful by default. Enforcing opinion, pedantism, and all unnecessary actions against a well intentioned user are reckless narcissism without the abstract big picture understanding of what is best for the real humans that the actions impact. Ignoring these potential edge cases is authoritarian incompetence and shows the person lacks the ethical foundation required to be fair and just, acting in the best interest of the community.
The issue of poor moderation through de facto authoritarianism grossly contradicting democratic participation of all users, is the primary issue of all link aggregators that goes unaddressed.
The biggest issue for Lemmy at the moment is instances that do not update to the latest version of Lemmy. If devs are hamstrung from fixing issues in new revisions, the entire platform and discussion of growth is mute. When the largest instance on Lemmy (LW) is not on the latest version of Lemmy, or the devs fail to ensure the stability required, progress is halted and complaints are useless negativity with no potential for change.
I made a whole instance just for the dull community
I also mod !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
I make content to help the communities grow, it’s hard not to participate when you tend to check those communities frequently. I also try not to participate too much because I realize that it’s not MY community. I’m more interested in the unique culture they develop. I have rarely had to take moderation actions, it’s really not something I like doing. I never want to take adverse actions against someone because of what they do outside of the community. Of course all of that would be very undull and therefore go against the rules and principles of the communities.
You can post about pancakes in either one if you want, it would probably be a big hit.
Is that a long-winded way of saying pancakes are dull? :p
We can all go to iHop and drink coffe for 3 hours and talk about the difference between pancakes and flapjacks.
I am a (nearly) daily user and I use the subscription feed. I am subscribed to lots of communities and if I used the “all” feed, I’d miss some of the posts to what I am interested in. So IMO it makes no sense for me to use “all”.
I’m on Lemmy off and on for hours a day. I see most posts using the “all” feed. Few people are in social isolation from physical disability with near infinite spare time or other circumstances that enable this. There are many times I wish Lemmy had more total volume of participation than the “all” feed. This is what I want to grow.
I was actually thinking of something similar a few days ago. The conclusion I came to is “comms as users.”
Communities being able to follow other communities is part of that. I think it’d be great.
An excellent article, thanks for posting!
That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on pancake@a.com and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!
The “communities following communities” seems like quite an elegant solution. Kind of like federating between communities in addition to instances. I wonder what the chances are that we’ll see this implemented?
For now, I suppose we’ll just have to continue with old-fashioned merging…
Piefed has feeds now, if people want to try: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273
That’s more like Proposal 2, and doesn’t actually solve the main issues with duplicate communities. Proposal 3 solves them quite elegantly.
You seem to like it, but for me the biggest issue is that it’s not going to happen any time soon.
Merging communities can be done now, as you are well aware 😄
the biggest issue is that it’s not going to happen any time soon
Yes, Lemmy development is slow, but Proposal 3 seems like such an elegant solution to me that I think it is worth striving for. There’s also no reason all three Proposals can’t be pursued in parallel, as they each have their own use cases.
Merging communities can be done now, as you are well aware
Yes, but it’s a bit of a pain, as you are also aware :)
There’s also no reason all three Proposals can’t be pursued in parallel, as they each have their own use cases.
Definitely!
Aware
Oh yeah 😄
How hard would it be to set up some default community “pools”? More or less like multireddits I guess.
It would be nice if they took what piefed built out. It’s a pretty nice system!
Piefed, man
Piefed is better
If communities are similar, why not consolidate?
!football@lemmy.world even used a script to ping everyone
Because that defeats the purpose of Federation. If one of the communities becomes infiltrated with nazis or whatever they can be defederated and removed from the the base “pool”.
Say you have a base pool of communities for all “motorcycle” related content. Anything from MotoGP stuff to general dirtbike stuff, who knows. Of course there are going to be some communities about Harleys in there and of course one of those is going to inevitably skew towards white nationalist nonsense. Well there ya go that’s out of the pool with that BS and everyone else gets to go about their day.
If they want to create their own motorcycle pool of communities then so be it but they don’t need to infect the rest of the of us.
I think the community subscription model in the article fixes this (imperfectly). Pancakepurists@a.com can have strict rules while pancakeparty@b.com could subscribe to it and pancakepurists could subscribe back with the understanding that the rules are slightly different there. Pancakechaos@nazi.assholes could similarly link to both those without either having to be mutually interactive.
I think the problem comes from some increased moderation loads by allowing a community to follow another. If I were to put on my paranoid hat it could be used to monitor and brigade a community. I think the solution for that is moderation tools. Banning instances, federation etc. I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t know what is possible.
Because that defeats the purpose of Federation
Isn’t that addressed in the article by Proposal 3?
Of course there are going to be some communities about Harleys in there and of course one of those is going to inevitably skew towards white nationalist nonsense
In that case, the rest of the motorcycle communities would simply unfollow the problematic one.
But in your scenario, all the communities have different niches: GP, dirtbike, Harley
In the article, the scenario is taken about identical communities, like !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@lemm.ee
Of course if at some point nazis invade people should migrate, but that doesn’t mean you should keep both active at the same time (also, nazis could invade both in parallel, not sure how that solves the issue here)
Yeah! There are LOTS of Cleveland communities, but I have declaired !cleveland@midwest.social to be the one true official Cleveland community.
No, see? I really did declaire this
So come join us, and talk about Tim Misneys eyebrows.
Finally! A community to share my true feelings about Yinzers!
…get…out.
Feel free to post on the other Cleveland communities to make people aware of yours
