If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.
‘Stop asking this’ is not a really helpful thing to say. We have a lot of new users, including myself, and everybody is figuring out how Lemmy works. Redundant questions will occur and lets answer those in a respectful manner.
Exactly. I was subbed to both meirl and me_irl without issue
To be fair they are very different subs
Eh, I guess I was just a casual viewer bc it all seemed the same to me. Never went to the comments
Reddit does not have the problem in the exact same way. To have to articulate the nuance would be exhausting and clearly not productive. Please continue to ask that question until this community has a valid answer.
Thanks for your answer with zero contribution. Reddit and lemmy may not have the problem in the exact same way, but they are effectively the same. Whether it’s r/technology vs. r/tech or [email protected] vs. [email protected] doesn’t matter to normal users.
I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance
There were duplicate communities all over Reddit too, as long as he didn’t have exactly the same name there were lots and lots of subs that had more or less the same content with overlaps of subscribers. Whenever those duplicates eventually one will pull ahead and most people will be active there.
I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.
Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.
Lemme give my case.
I see what you did there.
Didn’t intend to do that, but hey…
Users who are looking for larger communities can just dogpile whatever is popular and users who aren’t will find something that fits them better just as they always have. I think some people do struggle with not having the massive fire hose they are used to though but everything starts somewhere; it never was going to be everything to everyone all at once. I’m personally finding not being lost in a sea of noise to be more engaging.
Duplication happens on Reddit too. It’s not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.
Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.
I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).
The real question isn’t whether it will be good/bad … it’s what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.
I think critical mass is needed for certain communities, and user splitting is bad for that.
In the early days during growth, yes I think you’re right. Adds to the frustration of people learning about federation and all that to.
I often preferred using the alternate/splinter versions of many reddit subs. When a sub got too large, the quality went down fast. I think the redundancy is maybe a good thing.
Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it’s on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.
(I’m new to this, so some things might be a bit off or explained weirdly.)
No, actually. Because different instances are able to federalize with each other, essentially creating a link which will show content freely between them such as communities, posts, and comments. If you set your feed view from local to all, you should then see stuff from federalized instances. Now sometimes an instance can refuse to federalize, such as if thd one you’re using disallows NSFW content for example. There are also some times that I don’t understand yet (prolly cuz I’m a scrub) that federalization isn’t perfect, such as when you can access a community but not their posts, this I completely don’t understand and might be a mistake of some sort. Lemmy is definitely a bit more complicated than Reddit, but I believe that this is more a problem with user expectations/unknowingness than it is a design problem.
I think it’s a valid question. I think there is value in allowing separate communities, but it makes discovery harder.
It would be nice to see a way of creating meta lists with one click signup functionality, so curated lists can be created.
And/or the ability for communities to be able to link perhaps? So they become functionally one community, but with the ability to split remaining in the individual admins control.
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I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.
it matters a lot. if something is happening you want a quick overview of big discussion and not jump between a bunch of 10 small discussion rooms.
