Seeing a big “politics” community in both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world just confuses me as to which I should be subscribing to and I don’t really want to subscribe to both.
Guess this is just a downside of federated instances? There’ll never just be one “/r/politics” on Lemmy?
Honestly, I can see why some people find it annoying but in my experience so far it’s been fine. Do a sweep on lemmyverse, sub to all the communities around a given topic, never really think about which one it actually came from when I see a post in my feed.
There are some quite niche topics that have been unnecessarily split, essentially just because people want to be in charge rather than joining forces, but that’s people for you and railing about it isn’t gonna get us anywhere. From an end-user pov, subscribing to multiple has been fine.
From a different end-user POV, seeing the same stuff repeated is not fun. I would prefer to see everything once instead of choosing between seeing almost everything twice(subscribed to both) or missing a little bit(subscribed to one, blocked the other).
Oh that’s interesting, I wonder why I’ve not been seeing repeated posts. Maybe a setting somewhere, or a version difference, or we use different interfaces or whatever. Yeah I can definitely see how that would be annoying!
This is why the decentralized approach is great. If mods get their heads too power swollen, one can form their own community and even on their own server if they wish. The approach lessens the potential for abuse.
Totally agree - it’s a wonderful freedom, but it also means as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected and there isn’t a policy to transfer or reclaim the space if it is locked by the one person who owns it. Not a huge issue now, but come the point large companies are moving to the space it could well get quite messy!
as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected
What’s this about?
TMW you realize there’s no downside to joining multiple communities for the same topic, even if they have the same name.
Imo there is, but it’s solvable. Personally, I almost always browse specific communities/subs and almost never scroll through my home feed. So multiple communities is annoying because it means jumping between each one on the list. Could be solved though, by just implementing a Lemmy equivalent to multireddits.
The upside of this is that if you don’t like how a particular community is being moderated, you can follow a different community about the same topic
I strongly prefer it.
It’s a much more organic reflection of older systems. It used to be that there were local newspapers, national ones, and international ones. I want the same thing with my memes. I want a place I go to see what the hot movies and games across the world, and another where discussions are mostly people in my geography or who share a common set of tastes with me.
This idea that the internet should flatten the world into one monoculture has been, in my opinion, both naive and destructive to a lot of tastes that don’t align with the dominant tastemakers.
When I look at the many communities with the same names, I completely stops me from interacting with them. Most of the time I know they’re going to be copies of each other with a bunch of duplicate content reposted to infinity.
I think your example is interesting but i disagree with your assertion that it some how facilitates finding niche content.
For example it would be difficult to have to explicitly know that
obscure-instance.xyz/c/gameshosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands andprogramming.dev/c/gamesis actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nlandgame_designoffer a significantly better user experience. If we want to make the fediverse feel accessible to people, it has to be easy to find what you’re looking for.This whole thing feels like crypto where everyone has their own coin and they only kind of work together if you have some kind of exchange and some people accept Bitcoin and not Doge. It’s just too complicated for non technical people.
First, if it helps, redundant communities will solve themselves. We’re in a period where people are trying stuff out, but if one group is just a weaker duplicate of another, everyone will eventually just coalesce around the slightly better version.
As for the general complaint, I can see your rationale. But I think a better analogy instead of cryptocoins – which were all essentially useless ponzi schemes and ego projects – would be bars.
In theory, you don’t need two (or more!) sports bars on the same block. But there’s a reason they stay in business instead of one owner just expanding to serve twice as many customers. They have different vibes based on different people. One might dig soccer more, or have a better selection of craft brews. Even though they’re superficially similar, if you ask your friend, “Hey, do you want to go to X?” It’s not at all weird for them to say, “Eh… let’s to Y. if you want, we can stop by X later.”
You know what I mean?
The bar analogy is interesting but is missing the most important factor: All of the bars have the same name. The only difference is where they are located. Now I have to go to each one because I have no idea if they’re a soccer themed bar or a karaoke bar.
Even if the redundant communities somehow solve themselves (which I doubt), there will forever be an abandoned community polluting the search results because no one is going to delete it.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that [email protected] are gonna be lefty memes, and the memes at [email protected] will be generic, and so on.
There are some where it’s less distinct. [email protected] and [email protected] are not so easily differentiated, but at the moment they have totally different content on their frontpages, so I have no complaints. Over time, I expect both to evolve, most likely in different ways.
I think the search problem will get resolved over time. Currently, search is very rudimentary, and barely useful for finding new communities. As it becomes better and cataloging communities it can also become better at downranking or excluding communities below a certain activity level.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that [email protected] are gonna be lefty memes
Lol. I can only assume it’s a massive joke and I’m just not in on it. [email protected] in no way means “lefty memes”. It only proves my point
Well… are you subscribed to [email protected]?
I don’t expect you to know that Gerry’s Bar and Grill is a gay bar or that Fanatics is a Packers bar by their name. You find out by going there.
A good thing to note is that both of those bars you mentioned have different names. That makes it easier to know which to go to, once I figure out which is which.
I’d like to point out what just happened to [email protected].
It was closed and migrated to another instance explicitly to keep things from being “spread out”.
It also happens that the instance it was moved to has extremely overbearing moderation that effectively prevents actual discussion. It’s so “curated” that everything is segregated into hyper specific feeds, everything except “official” news is removed, and no one is contributing because of the overbearing rules (no questions, no memes, no “rants” i.e. don’t make opinion posts).
It’s controlled by the “experienced” moderation team from /r/Android, that subreddit that would get like one or two posts a day that weren’t removed. It was strangled. We are supposed to defer to it this “experienced” team, hence why the lemmy.world instance has been locked. Now that instance sits pretty as having thousands of subscribers, and that will hurt the growth of smaller android groups because people gravitate towards the biggest ones and the second biggest one on lemmy.world is locked.
In essence, forced centralization. This is exactly what federation was supposed to prevent. Subverted in less than a two weeks since those communities formed.
I think in that case the “forced” centralisation is purely constructed. There are no mechanisms preventing somebody from creating an android community in their own instance and federating it with lemmy.world. Even if [email protected] is permanently locked, that fact isn’t really a barrier to entry for another android community to pop up, just that that community was able to establish a subscriber base over time but I don’t see why another android community couldn’t do the same given some time, especially if the available android communities at the moment are locked and restricted.
Imo admins should not allow the lockdown of a community on one instance in favor of the one on another. It’s fine if the original mod wants to switch, but then just get someone else to mod the community or close it down until someone decides to claim it again.
Reddit has multiple repeat communities too, they just have different names. Just to take one example, there’s /r/Canada, which got taken over by right wing assholes, /r/metacanada for those same right wing assholes to go full mask off, /r/onguardforthee for the people who didn’t want to put up with the right wing assholes… You get the picture.
The fact that there are multiple overlapping communities with similar purposes can be frustrating, but it also provides layers of redundancy, which is what the fediverse is all about. We’ve been learning a lot of object lessons recently about the problems of putting all your eggs in one basket.
I don’t like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don’t know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it’s possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. “Cats” and it’s shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.
This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
That is inherent with the decentralized nature of instances. Hopefully with all the new dev attention we’ll get community grouping and account linking to make it a bit another. But if you don’t like the power consolidation from centralized systems this is the solution, warts and all.
Not really. I usually just check the subscriber count and pick the larger one. Unless if they’re about the same, then I’ll sub to both. Just means I’ll see more content. Might be a bit of overlap sometimes, but not always.
Yeah. I too find it annoying.
Do you believe if you pick up the new york times it will have the same take as the bbc? I want more than 1 car magazine to exist. If one magazine starts to do things I don’t enjoy I can use another. Example, threads makes a car magazine, has more user base and everyone flocks to it over time for more frequent content change. Now threads starts manipulating content and putting in more advertisements… either you now have to go through a big change, or you just go to motortrend for a while until they have to hopefully scale back ads and such to keep users.
idk. it’s more like having 6 magazines about hyundai cars, i never know which of the ones to buy because they all look the same, and if i just buy half of them, the article i’m interested in is guaranteed to be in the one i didn’t buy.
and one day they all vanish after neither one sold enough copies to make profit.
it splits the community, what is a bad thing if the community isn’t super big to begin with. and it adds extra confusion to new users. and extra effort for people who want to stay up to date. and if i have a niche question i can’t just ask many people at once. i first have to look up in which community i need to ask. or i just ask in every community and annoy the people who subscribed to multiple ones… it’s just not a good solution to anything…
the one thing where this would be a good thing is if the communities were reasonably different. different in topic, focus, a noticable different culture of discussion or moderation, something drastic enough to warrant people splitting up … like your analogy with the nyt or bbc. but it’s simply not the case for these communities.
I’m curious, what’s your concern with subscribing to both? I had the same thought when I switched and then thought “is this just a knee jerk reaction? I can’t think of a decent reason why it’s that annoying when they both appear in my subs feed anyway”
I’m interested to hear why others might not like it as that might be what I’m thinking without realising.
The major concern is whether to cross-post so that members of only one community can see posts from the other, or to avoid cross posts so that people subscribed to both don’t see duplicates
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