As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
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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
Exactly, and natural selection will do the rest.
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.
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’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.
You’re right. After almost a decade and a half on reddit, I’d forgotten that it also had a learning curve when I first came across it.
I guess that speaks to how terrible the official reddit app is, I’d rather learn a whole new site with a whole new framework than view reddit without RiF is Fun.
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.
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.
it’s not fedded with burggit.moe for some reason
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.
@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
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
We are still in the discovery zone where the communities are spread out, over time it will stabilize.
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.
Yeah I think it is. If you go to settings you can change the default (under “Type”).
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.
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 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 paint 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
Ah, but we like a bustling village. We want a bustling village! That means more friends to visit our porch, and more porches for us to go visit. (Village = Fediverse)
Take shelter in my cottage, be kind, get your feet back under you. When you’ve caught your breath start building your cottage/McMansion/apartment block. Ask the neighbors for help, they like helping. When you’ve got yours built and you’ve moved in, come join the porch parties and have a celebratory beer or glass of wine or cup of tea!
(really pushing the metaphor, I know… humor me!)
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 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.
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?
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.
Here is an issue that would solve this, but ideas are welcome.
This is exactly what i want
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think that’s accurate.
I’m as new as the next guy, but that certainly doesn’t mesh with my understanding of federation at all. Per my understanding, communities are completely unrelated across instances. AITA on lemmy.world can be run by UserA and have SetofrulesA with BanlistA, while AITA on lemmy.ml can be run by UserB with SoR-B and BL-B. AFAIK It’s the entire point of federation, that if I don’t like how AITA on lemmy.whatevs is run I can spin up my own and go on my merry way.
Perhaps someone more in the know will turn up but I believe that you were told wrong.
If you’re banned by an admin on your login Lemmy server, then that account is basically done for and you’d need to create another account on that server or on another server. However, by default I believe server bans are temporary, usually only for a few days.
But if you’ve been banned from a community (a sub) by a mod, that ban is only in effect for that community on that server. Nothing is stopping you from participating in any other community on any other Lemmy server.
Thank you for the clarification!
And what happens if an admin of a non-login server bans a user? Is that just a ban across all communities of that specific server?
I would assume so. The ban wouldn’t affect anything beyond their own server.
I think 100 is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration and it matters in this case. Subbing to perhaps 5 communities about Formel 1 cars or whatever have you is not so much of an ordeal. Especially because probably most users in these communities will also be subbed to the other communities. So you very likely won’t need to post the same stuff multiple times.
It would be great though, if communities would group better in some way, perhaps like tabs in my own dashboard where I can sort the communities by topic.
It would also help if people would use the community browser to see if there are similar communities already to the one they plan to make, so that they can connect with each other.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh man, it’s going to be so much fun to have to group similar communities when there are hundreds of instances and all with similar communities! 🙃
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.
Interestingly you are bascially saying its a UX issue not a fundamental one.
Manageable over the term.
Correct, IMO it’s purely a UX issue.
I think the current default UI feels awkward because it’s essentially trying to present dozens of individual web forums through a Reddit style interface.
Edit: which makes the argument that this isn’t a problem because Lemmy isn’t Reddit seem funny since at least to me the problem stems from Lemmy trying too hard to replicate the UX of Reddit.
Also, could we have a confirmation dialog for deleting posts. It’s a bit too easy to accidentally hit the trashcan, especially on mobile.
yeah certainly not giving the UX a pass more than “it is what it is right now” def needs update, though I agree making it “more like reddit” is not likely the best play.
I’m sorta starting to miss the days of usenet and web forums. Although it was all spread over several “instances” it was still discoverable and nicely hierarchical and it was easy to get an over view of the activity and current topics.
loaded up IRC yesterday, the “more simple” Uis are still easier to process, but people hate them. Id go back to vt100 and macros for social. Just give me some basic rendering for images and rickrolls.
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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)
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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
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I don’t think you’ll have to sift through that many options. There’s going to be an obvious choice that has 5-10x more subscribers than the next one. Sure that isn’t the case right now, but overtime that’s what it will look like. I can only imagine that reddit had similar issues early on too.
