Is it worthwhile to try to get mods to combine them? It just seems like a bit of a waste when trying to grow a community and its split in two.
Or is this what the fediverse is supposed to look like?
I read before somebody said that we might be able to combine similar communities at some point but don’t know if that’s true.
this gets asked a lot. Yes, the whole point of this platform is to be decentralized. Nothing stops you, or anyone, from following 5 different communities on the same topic. The advantages are many. Basically each instance will be able to mod with/apply different rules to their communities, they will attract different crowds (even if they overlap a lot) and they will have a different style. If one goes down, which is likely in these platforms, or if say an instance cannot be sustained anymore, or if one of the instances defederates your instance, or whatever- not all is lost. You still have all the other communities to follow.
there is a popular saying that goes, ‘‘don’t put all your eggs in the same basket’’.
Apologies if this is a repeat question. I’m not entirely sure if there is a way to search in Jerboa for similar posts but I don’t think there.
oh I didn’t mean it that way, no need to apologize. I just notice this question comes up a lot inside different communities, people often wonder why there are also two/three/N other communities and why don’t they all merge. It highlights a lot of people still expect things to be centralized even in a decentralized space. But, it’s good that you ask, so hopefully more people understand better why it’s good thing to avoid monopolies on topics.
The search function should function the same way as the search function on the official web interface. That means however, unless you’re searching the url of a specific community, it can only search for communities, comments and posts on instances it has cached. If it hasn’t had a member visit a community at least once, it won’t know it exists.
I recommend browse.feddit.de to search for communities, and for newly created communities, you can search through the posts in !newcommunities@lemmy.world
There are many other places to look, you can find multiple lists of communities that migrated from Reddit with a quick google search.
Just saw that some apps do have a search function already. I’ve been using Jerboa and it doesn’t have one yet (for posts/comments that is).
Thanks
We need a feature to combine several communities into a group that we can follow in our subscriptions.
Then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
My suggestion on GitHub was to let instance admin create a local /g/ grouping, with the freedom in how they utilise a /g/ group.
Some people argued that they should be able to make it per account, like a multireddit, but the point was for new and general users having easier access to broader fediverse content.
The instance admin would only need to do some legwork at first, then they could add to it as they go along. The barrier of entry for new users finding which communities outside of their instance is substantial.
Idk if it needs to be a server side thing or if it could be client-side
Yeah. I think this is a good solution. It’s then up to the user to decide if they want to combine or not.
What would be the difference then between subscribing to, say, 10 different communities separately, or a group of 10 communities?
If there are 5 different instances with the same community, to subscribe to all of them you have to go find them all.
If kbin had a feature to combine them in groups like this, when you went to subscribe to one version of the community, it could let you subscribe to all of them at once. Without having to hunt them down.
I thought about that too, but I also can see a scenario where as the userbase grows, one instance’s community is seen as the “default”. I suppose the upside is that if something happens to one instance, there will be a backup of sorts on another instance - which in a way is sort one of the points of decentralisation.
Yes, that’s a risk, but it also gives communities the opportunity to migrate to a new server in case they get captured by hostile mods.
For example, my government will have presidential elections next year, and it’s trying very hard to preemptively co-opt the corresponding subreddit with propaganda. If the sub had joined the protests and their mods removed, today it would likely be captured by government people. That won’t stop them, for example, from trying to offer money to some mods in exchange for preferential treatment, or even mod privileges, but here the competition means they won’t control the sole community with the country name.
For me it doesn’t matter. I subscribe to all the communities that interest me, no matter which instance they are on.
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I would say merging them doesn’t make much sense, but combining them (via some multi-sub entity a user can subscribe to) would be a nice way to organise and browse/filter your subscriptions.
The way I see it, the fediverse itself is the conversational arena, not any particular community within the fediverse. Communities limited to a single instance shouldn’t have primacy, because some of those instances don’t even want their communities open to certain other instances on the fediverse. Since some of the biggest communities keep defederating each other over petty moderator politics, it’s absolutely a good thing that the the fediverse has multiple communities for the same topic, or even with the same name. As long as you’re on an instance that doesn’t defederate other instances, you’ll see them all and can interact on them from a single account. More than that though, people wielding too much centralized power always turn out to be dicks, so anything that maintains decentralization of power is good.
I don’t think so. I mean, even if an instance with an important community has a problem (e.g. goes offline) we can simply create that community on another instance, but as long as there are no problems I think it’s better to have just one community.
That’s exactly what happened with reddit, I think it’s better to have more than one, worst case scenario you only sub to one and if it goes down there’s a quick alternative.
Personally I sub to both and if an article repeats no big deal I just move on
I think the type of communities you want to see affects how you look at the repetition aspect.
I like to use the sports communities for news/discussion around the time an event is taking place. Following live speedy discussion doesn’t quite work as seamlessly on two different communities. You just kind of end up picking one community and post there.
As long as there is a way to spin up a new community if the mods go rogue, I’m okay with it.
I think that’ll always be the case with the Fediverse.
I think it’s fine, it will all just work out over time.
No, that defeats the purpose of the fediverse and its structure. This avoids power mods from taking over since they’re different instances. People can always cross post to the same community across different instances.
I think I need to learn how to crosspost in Jerboa.
I don’t really get the point about power mods. Why would you not create the alternative community at the time the mod starts to becomes a problem?
Isn’t creating an alternative community at the beginning when the mods are fine kind of unnecessary and just causing a split?
They can already be seen in tandem with each other. If anything, it just gives more content for the same topics. I really don’t know what purpose consolidation would ultimately serve.
This is how it is supposed to work, yes. However. i will say one suggestion going forward might be some sort of voluntary community sub-federating. The idea is that communities from different instances that are considered similar in topic enough to be under the same umbrella would federate or group with each other. A person who subscribes to one might see content from other communities that have voluntarily opted into this feature. It would connect the scattered communities of topics while also allowing these communities to “defederate” on their own from other communities of the same topic, in the event that malicious communities attempt to joing where they do not belong.
This could also be given to the user, the ability for users to group their own subscriptions together, but this would put way more work on the end user and may not be as intuitive.
For example, I am subscribed to one Silent Hill community, and I think I am the only member beside the mod, with no posts. It would be nice if I could see content from other Silent Hill communities in that feed.
I think it’s a good thing to have more than one community devoted to a topic. I have already discovered that I don’t like this or that community on this or that instance but I like another community on another instance dedicated to the same or similar topic. People have different styles and preferences even though they have similar subjects in common. It’s like having different supermarkets or clothing stores. Some like to get their jeans at The Gap. Others prefer Levi’s. Giving users more choices is good in my experience. It used to be this way in the days of forums and usenet news groups. I think if you’re not used to it you will get used to it. It’s like shopping around for a good class at college or looking for the right pair of jeans that fits you the right way.
Question: How many posts do you view from a given subreddit in a day?
How many comments on any given post do you read?
How many people need to be in a community to generate that many posts and comments? Because communities don’t really need to be any bigger than that.
Having FOMO over what’s going on in other communities is normal, but it’s not helpful or useful. It’s not like you weren’t missing out on 99.9% of posts on big subreddits, or 99.9999999% of comments. And let’s not pretend like what floats to the top in large subs is the best content. Popularity contests are not meritocracies.
Having 1000 communities on the same topic with 1000 active users each is better than having 1 community with 1,000,000 active users. Those users are easier to moderate, they’re more likely to see other community members as people, and they’re more likely to have their posts and comments viewed and interacted with by others.
And if something really interesting is happening in another one, someone will link to it.
On top of all that, consider the context of different communities. !politics on lemmy.ca is probably going to be a very different space than on, say, murica.fuckyeah. !games is going to me a differernt things on pathfinder.social than it will on startrek.website.
Imagining that spaces with big numbers are being shattered into small clones is not the right lens to look at this from.
