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 that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.^
If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may “win,” you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.
You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.
tl;dr I’ll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers
I can have my cc/aww and eat it too.
I appreciate how relevant this meme is 😂
You can even create an instance with a domain blackjackandhookers.xxx/c/aww !
/c/instancesifellfor
/m/instancesifellfor
!!!
Ah, dammit
sign me up
Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I’ve mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.
It’s not pointless, it’s just…not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that’s the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that’s perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don’t have to pick one and forsake all others.
In regards to your other point, It’s also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It’s a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.
you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don’t have to pick one and forsake all others.
That’s one of the cons of decentralization. You take the good and the bad.
One of the pros, on that exact same hand, is if you don’t like a particular c/aww on a particular instance, you can create your own c/aww on a separate instance and give it the rules you’d like to see in a community where people post cute pictures.
I think the mistake a lot of other newbies are making is believing that this is going to be exactly like Reddit and nothing needs changing ever if we merely build it. No, it’s like Reddit, but there are key differences. And you either live with those differences and stick it out until you figure out how it works, you go find another alternative, or you go back to Reddit.
No choice is wrong. Do what works for you.
Coming back to this to say one of the major pros of federation/decentralization is the redundancy will mean you can still get content on Lemmy, even if a particular server goes down. If Reddit goes down, you have to go outside and touch grass. If a Lemmy server goes down, the grass can remain untouched. You’ll get content from other instances.
I think one point they’re trying to make is that it would be nice to have “supercommunities”, for example a kind of community that is the aggregated sum of all the individual communities it subscribes to, so for example super/aww that contains c/aww@1, c/aww@2, etc.
I can’t reply to the other comment,(my first block maybe?) but I wouldn’t hold out hope that Reddit exiles will force the devs to say fuck it and make Lemmy a Reddit clone.
Those are in the works if you want to support those, that’s not what Lemmy is for. Don’t go to a decentralized platform and demand a central authority. 🤷
EDIT: Downvote harder Reddit stans lmao
It’s not a reddit clone just because you can aggregate content, that seems like a rather narrow view. The instances could still host their own communities and the supercommunities could exist alongside one another and choose which communities would be part of them, it would just be a functionality that perhaps some users would find helpful. Wouldn’t even have to be on Lemmy but for example on kbin or another alternative.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn’t it increase the usefulness of federation since it distributes the data but allows for the communities to remain connected to each other? Couldn’t you just not partake of that feature if you’re opposed to it?
Did you not read my comment at all? I’m saying it is NOT a Reddit clone, and shouldn’t give into pressure to become one. The entire point of federation is that instances and communities exist independently of each other, but half of the comments and posts I’ve seen are just bitching there’s no central authority running the show on the system that explicitly touts it’s lack of central authority. It’s going to KFC and throwing a bitch fit they won’t serve you lasagna.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn’t it increase the usefulness of federation?
It’s a bad thing (and also not really possible) because it would require a central authority to organize that through. If you want to follow three communities…Just follow three communities. It’s not that hard.
You left Reddit because of the actions of a central authority, went to an alternative that advertises the lack thereof, then cried that there’s no central authority. It’s fine if you want that, but GO TO ONE OF THOSE OPTIONS instead of demanding devs toss their vision out the window for your comfort.
It’s open source, they can code this in eventually for sure. I am not making a fuss. I’m patiently waiting for the very hard working founders of Lemmy to eventually carry out the will of the community.
A possible better solution might be to allow the user to create their own group (or super community if you prefer that name) where they can group multiple communities together in a way they see fit (not just necessarily clones of the same community. Examples could be a sports group that allows you to group together communities for all the teams you follow).
This would be beneficial I feel for most users, doesn’t affect decentralization, doesn’t require a central authority and would be only relevant to each individual user and not applied to anyone else
I’m not talking about a central authority, im talking about an accumulation of content and voting
It’ll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it’ll be your link factory
Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.
It’s similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.
This was my first thought. Reddit had both r/DnD and r/DungeonsAndDragons. It was fine
/r/me_irl and /r/meirl
/r/hiphopheads and /r/rap
This isn’t new
Really the protocols can develop “trending” type functionality for popularity, and “aggregate” groups (tag-based, explicit lists of groups, whatever) for which sub…lemmy’s are basically “the same”. lemmy.world/aww, lemmy.aww/aww, etc. Lemmy may not do it, but it’s doable.
Nah, it’s more than that. It’s a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.
It doesn’t start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you’re suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs
Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.
At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place
There’s also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you’re going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don’t want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they’re going to ruin things
I mean, there’s also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they’re not cut off from the network, but the instances don’t talk directly to each other anymore.
And while we’re very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.
I’d like to see science and technology go in that direction because I’ll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it’s easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization
I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from aww@lemmy.ml and aww@lemmy.world and awwwwww@sh.itjustworks etc.
If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don’t think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.
I’m not opposed to some sort of client side conglomeration, but almost every person I’m seeing isn’t looking for a tool to use on their own to customize their feed - they want every iteration of a community name automatically congealed into a single community for them to sub to a la Reddit…
Which can’t be done without a central authority. Some people argue makinf a new community which scrapes every iteration of a community name automatically, but that’s just content theft at that point.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
By people creating their own groups of subs I mean a group saved on their private app or profile, not some other huge functionality to the system creating lists that is shared publicly, that would require a central authority an major changes. Heck, an app like jerboa could probably do it itself. The people that want to migrate every iteration of a subject into one don’t get the fediverse. But being able to add like communities to a list yourself gets rid of the fractured communities downside of the fediverse. If you stumble on another community on the subject you add it to that catagory/group. It would also increase the users investment and loyalty to their account.
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Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.
Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.
🥈 take my free award. It’s yours
and my axe
this is the way
Edit: thanks for the gold!
“wholesome”
I like to think of it as a bunch of Discord servers (in a way). Each server is run by the owner / their moderation and can have different channels and rules in said server.
The idea of a “super community” doesnt seem like a bad one, but I’d rather have it be an aggregation of said communities then making it all one thing.
… Like maybe super list of c/aww communities that you can subscribe to at once.
I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that “email” analogy I’ve been seeing
Email explains how instances work really well, since an email domain functions like how instances tagging does.
Communities are a different story, there isn’t a good analogue to that.
The “discord” analogy cannot explain well the accounts on different servers part. I’ll agree that the “email” one can’t really explain communities on lemmy etc.
I’m certainly not opposed to a way to make personal aggregate…things, but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever. They aren’t asking for an ability to pick and choose communities to build a personal “super community” for themselves client side, they want all the c/aww’s to be automatically pulled together by a central authority - the thing they’re fleeing and came here for the lack of.
I’ve heard people are working on 1 for 1 Reddit clones, and I’d really like to see those people just go support those projects instead of getting mad that the thing advertising a lack of central authority has no central authority and demanding devs “LiStEn To ThEiR uSeRs” and institute one.
but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever.
I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt. Coming from a centralized service means people are used to things working in a certain way, and they may just not have considered all the advantages of not being forced into a single, centralized service.
I can get that, and have been overall understanding. I’ve been trying to do my part to explain this isn’t that - it’s the uptick in hostility over it that has me irate. “I don’t get it,” “not for me,” all fine. “Devs need to make it work like Reddit or else” can fuck off.
I hear you. Yes, not a fan of people being hostile just because something is different.
I’m just hoping that people who enjoy this experience will stay and that more people who also like this experience will join, and that people who want everything to be exactly like Reddit will return to Reddit or to some Reddit-like platform that works exactly like Reddit.
Had this same complaint/concern but this is a really good explanation of it. Thanks!
How do I search the various instances?
I’m not sure if there’s a better way, but I found this: https://browse.feddit.de/
It crawls most of the instances and lets you search for communities across all of them.
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Thanks! I hadn’t seen that list yet, it looks pretty good too. Hopefully something similar to either of these options will be included in a future release.
Doubly awesome - not only can you subscribe to both versions of said /c/aww on (most) any server, you will see the content inline with your normal feed so it’s effectively just several versions of the same thing.
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.
there were redundant communities on reddit, there are always redundant communities, we are in a phase where we will see more not less. This is not a huge issue overall, though it will be distressing to those who have become accustom to what 6 and 7 figure subs are like.
realistically, i dont think its the best idea to hand any one server the majoirty of any topic or content, you will end up with the same problems all over again. Instead I would want to see tagging and a way to integrate community content from multiple communities. Something as simple as being able to make a community that is just a subscription list of many communities and shows thier content will work.
People were promoting tagging on Reddit as early as 2008. They came up with subreddits which did about 50% of the work of tagging, but also allowed communities to stay distinct and establish their own cultures. I think the lack of tagging is what made Reddit so special, and I think Lemmy shouldn’t implement it either.
Regarding redundancy, I agree. I’m from Seattle, and people migrated from /r/Seattle to /r/SeattleWA to /r/seawa as the culture of each shifted. I can see something like that happening here.
I mean tagging posts and reddit had that, you no like?
Rather than make a node with 12 communities because i want to segment content i want to make a server with 1 community and tags. yes reddit called it “flair”
Oh I see what you’re saying. But yeah, I suspect one sub will take over the others. I don’t think there were too many instances of two subreddits on a topic with similar levels of activity.
its a natural consequence of groups, its a fallacy to expect a group to maintain its culture as it grows, inevitably the culture moves toward new means that excludes some portion of that group, this is where a lot of splinter communities come from.
There are also other reasons to, for example my AI community is mainly my shared list of links worth reading on the topic. Rather than keep it private I am sharing. I would not want to just drop these in an ocean as I can to refer back to a carefully curated list. On reddit I found at least 200 others that wanted the same for this topic. This kind of use is more akin to how reddit was used prior to comments, is still a valid use and will appear redundant to the uninitiated.
No it is rare to have 2 similarly sized instances, but that does not usually stop splinter communities from growing. When we look at a system like reddit and see the outward power the admins have becasue all the people are THERE, Im not sure we would want to be so ready to replicate it, there are other ways to get a lot of the same but with even better controls.
Don’t drive for centralization, drive for protocols and standards.
Don’t drive for centralization, drive for protocols and standards.
Speaking of, it may help somewhat if there was a little more community encouragement to make somewhat distinct community names (where useful or relevant). Nothing hard-coded, but a general standard to help differentiate communities.
what are you thinking?
as of now we have the name and the instance its on. so you at least know its not your instance, most instances seem general, which I admit is confusing, I went for a topical server more like the old forums, I feel like this is going to be a better way to manage things since most people often spend years in thier topic areas and often want tighter and faster comms with that circle while they are engaged.
personally id like to see more portability of accounts and def better UI so people understand what they are dealing with.
Oh, good point. I’d been browsing local more here & other Lemmy instances, so forgot it does indicate the origin instance.
Generally I agree with the inclination towards more focused/topical servers, so then the sub-communities almost naturally set themselves apart as they focus on more specifics, e.g. Tech instance and sub-communities for specific types of hardware, software, etc. That said, I’d also appreciate better account portability, and UI.
General instances are kind of an odd thing for federated sites tbh, but they make sense as a sort of reception area/lobby for the rest of the space. Come to think of it, an interesting (if impractical) idea that may work better for this style (forum/link aggregator) may be the possibility of remote community creation, e.g. person from lemmy.world being able to create a community in a hypothetical tech.lemmy. Although that would necessitate a whole host of improved permissions to ensure folks can’t mess with each other.
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
I think it is just going to be one of those crazy growing pains until users start picking one of them. And in true internet fashion, I fully expect gaming to consolidate around two, starting the next great flame war.
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 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.
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.
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?
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 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 pain 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!)
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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Reddit had similar issues. There were quite often multiple subreddits that were essentially the same thing. Sometimes it was just that multiple people made similar subreddits, sometimes there was one original subreddit that had some sort of schism.
It’s just that Reddit had a large enough userbase that two near-identical subreddits could do well enough that one didn’t supplant the other.
Yeah, but not really. You couldn’t create r/Doug twice. You could create r/Dougs or r/Dougie, but not two r/Doug. Here, you can create a “Doug” for every server that exists.
I have hope for solutions though. There’s only about 8,000 active subreddits in total. The cream will rise to the top quickly and we’ll all get used to subscribing to the ‘top 3 or 4’ “Doug” communities and I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.
I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, it would give the impression of something that is not there. Imagine talking to someone about a post that you just read but that someone else literally can’t see because they aren’t using the app, so they can’t see that instance. Plus, how do you handle communities on instances that have been blocked by some other instances?
A better way would be to have a way to officially merge these communities within ActivityPub. Effectively, have a protocol for cross instance communities, and then the mods of the disparate communities would just have to actively choose to join their communities. It’d be like the reddit sub splitting, but in reverse!
Look, as long as I don’t have to remember both a community AND a server name, I’m good. I just don’t want to hav to remember and / or subscribe to multiple things with the exact same name.
I can understand that desire, but think about this from a practical perspective. You are on lemmy.world, but someone else is on lemmy.ml. If you both use the same app that does this behind the scenes aggregation for you, you won’t be able to tell which instance is holding which post. Let’s say someone on sh.itjust.works posts on their instance of a community, but the app just makes it appear like it’s in the community.
Now, if lemmy.world blocks sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml does not, then you can’t see that post, since it’s blocked for you. But the person on lemmy.ml and on sh.itjust.works would be able to see it. This is a good example of solving a problem by create a dozen new ones.
Lemmy developers have been discussing how to address this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
There isn’t a clear solution, since some communities have different names, so how would an app know to join them? Or would you join communities that had deliberately been split for various reasons?
Clearly coordination and agreement between leaders is needed. I suggested something like that with a pseudo-instance of “@global”, for example. However, it seems there is some resistance to the mere idea of globalizing certain popular communities, which I can understand.
Federation comes with its own set of problems, like replication, data volume, storage requirements, and massive overlap.
That last one affects user experience directly, and needs to be addressed. Maybe it will sort itself out, maybe not. If we have 10,000 servers, even 100 almost the same communities means quite a bit of work on the part of users just to decide which ones to join.
We are looking at the human equivalent of a system with an extremely fragmented disk, or database tables with indexes that end up doing table scans.
Periodic re-organization will be necessary to to maintain usability.
Having a global space defeats the point of federation, though, because now everyone depends on a central authority.
I think a solution could be to allow communities to merge voluntarily if the mods of both agree to. It would only work with instances that aren’t blocked anywere. But users that would be subscibed to one would automatically be subscibed to all the merged commuities as well and you could post to the merged commuity from any of the participating instances. That would have the advantage that if one instance fails the community would almost seamlessly continue on the other instances.
That would probably be the best way to do it. Let the community mods agree which others they’re “bundled” with, make it part of the metadata about each community, and then when someone subscribes to Bob1, their home server gets the list of related communities and adds them to Bob2 and Bob3 as well (but not Bobs 4 through 256, which aren’t on Bob1’s list)
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Oh I understand how it works and the PROBLEM is that me, the user, shouldn’t give a shit if lemmy.world blocks sh.it just.works because the two admins are mortal enemies. But right now, I have to, because I would lose the content if one blocks the other.
Also, when you have 10,000 servers and on each server someone created a “Technology” community on all of them, how will ANY of those communities get any traction or a concentrated user base? As a creator, I’d be cross posting on every Technology community in every server I could find. That’s going to serve to fracture the comments section, which is where all the value comes from anyway.
I agree
Auto-combining would be a terrible idea, because you can’t guarantee that everything with the same name is actually on the same topic, or has the same posting culture. One Doug might be about the cartoon character, the other might be about a real person named Doug.
yeah, a lot of subreddits have a clone like /r/offmychest and /r/trueoffmychest, because someone didn’t like moderation and created their own version.
yeah, a lot of subreddits had a clone like /r/offmychest and /r/trueoffmychest, because someone didn’t like moderation and created their own version.
I’m just trying to subscribe to as many of the duplicates as I come across for communities I see and like. I suspect eventually some will become the most popular ones and ‘win’ the unofficial title as the ‘main one’ if the overall user base continues to grow. Am I right in thinking it also depends on which instances your ‘home instance’ continues to federate with (IE admins don’t block) or have I totally misunderstood and overcomplicated how it works in my mind?
If I’m understanding this whole thing correctly: an instance that your ‘home instance’ (where you signed up) has federated with might host a larger user base for one community, but if their admins blocks your home instance or vice versa, you lose the ability to interact with that community(?) I would think this means ideally you want your home instance to host the community that ‘wins’ so you’re less likely to lose access, right?
So if hypothetically for whatever reason lemmy.world or lemmy.ml blocked the other, users who signed up on lemmy.world would lose access to the communities hosted on lemmy.ml and vice versa. So duplicates would still pop up if the most popular community is hosted somewhere your home doesn’t have access to, right? I’m far less likely to create multiple accounts just to access an unofficial ‘main’ cat community than I am to just click ‘subsctibe’ on any available sub with the word ‘cat’ in it.
I am also still trying to wrap my head around how all this connects, right now just testing things out on lemmy.world while my friend is setting up their own instance that I might hop onto. Just interested to see how all this plays out!
I think defederation is an interesting element to Lemmy, but I wouldn’t sweat too much over it. It’s highly unlikely that any large instances are going to defederate from each other without a good reason. Namely NSFW content (so boobs don’t show up on your “all” feed) and major political differences (so tankies and fascists and others with extreme political views don’t bombard your communities). If you do want to subscribe to an instance with extreme political views or with boobs, then you’ll probably need to have a few accounts for those different exceptions. And they can both be logged in at the same time. You can go to lemmy.world when you want regular content and lemmynsfw.com when you want boobs. But I really don’t think you’re going to feel defederation very much. Only in those exceptional cases. And there will always be instances that allow both the regular content and the nsfw/extreme content. If you disagree with your instance admins, you just need to find an instance that better matches what you want to see.
For what it’s worth, lemmy.world seems pretty committed to not defederating. They haven’t defederated from lemmygrad.ml (communist lemmy) like many other instances have. The only instance they’ve blocked explicitly approves of people posting loli (underage anime porn), which is pretty damming.
Yeah I’m actually really glad we are defederated with that instance, I definitely don’t want to see those things and it made me think pretty highly of this instances admins. There are definitely lines that shouldn’t be crossed and it seems the admins here understand that while still wanting to be open which is pretty cool.
So while lemmy.world probably won’t block them, if lemmygrad.ml blocked lemmy.world would I still be able to see posts from communities I’ve subscribed to from there or would everything be cut off? I’m not really here to participate in online politics but I like reading it. American politics is an interest and I am a socialist so I enjoy seeing different opinions, but I try to keep my political activities to irl local politics in my own country, I just want memes and to be able to read differing opinions of Americans even if I don’t engage directly with them.
I’m pretty sure that when one instance blocks another, both become unreachable to each other. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to see lemmygrad if you go there manually. One nice thing about Lemmy is that you don’t need an account to see everything. You just won’t be able to vote or comment without an account. Which to be honest is how it should be. The reason an instance would consider blocking another is if they don’t want to be brigaded by people that aren’t interested in having an honest conversation within their community. With that said, if instance A blocks instance B, there will almost certainly always exist an instance C that can still reach both other instances. So if lemmyworld ever did get blocked by instances you’re really interested in, there should always be a way to have both.
I’ve had my first opportunity to see how this works first hand now actually with beehaw defederating with us and it seems to confirm this, except I can’t seem to see new posts added which answers the question for definite lol.
So when on my lemmy.world account I can no longer see new posts from communities I’ve subscribed to on beehaw, but I can still see the posts from before defederating if I go to them directly. This is true at least using the jerboa app, maybe it’s different on browser but I’m a phone user so I don’t use the browser lol. I had to switch to my feddit.uk account to see new beehaw posts on my subscribed communities to confirm it wasn’t just a slow community.
Hopefully it becomes easier to subscribe to communities on the app sooner rather than later so I can actually have the energy to join these communities on multiple accounts so if more defederation happens I can still just read them haha
Aaaaaand I’m already eating my words…
I think the main solution is to have an easy way of searching for existing communities before deciding to make you own. browse.feddit.de seems to be a good step in that direction to me.
Does it really know all communities? I’m on feddit.de and created a bunch of communities there as a rexxiteer because I could not find them.
how long ago? I started an instance yesterday and its only been this afternoon that im starting to see posts in my ALL lists that are not also my subscriptions.
No idea honestly. My best guess would be that browse.feddit.de hasn’t cached those communities yet if you just recently created them. There’s options to turn on/off different instances in the sidebar, and it looks like feddit.de is on by default.
I just sub to both if I run into a sublemmy collision where both are sizable. It is a little weird and I’d like to see some clean way to merge them in the future (i.e. with content migration and redirects), but for now it is what it is.
Now what we need are concatenated multi-communities where I can have a linkable collection of each of these overlapping subscriptions at multiple federated instances. In RES they were “multi-reddits” and they were my primary way of compartmentalizing and consuming content.
I suggested this in a different thread, but I think it would be cool to be able to create and share feeds surrounding a topic. All the posts from the communities that are included in the feed show up there, and you can share that feed with other people so they don’t need to do all the hard work of discovery themselves.
Surely the devs are already looking at something like this.
What would you call them?
I know on Kbin instances you can group feed with hashtags, which can group posts, magazines (“communities” on Lemmy), miniblogs under the same feed, and will fetch from other protocols beside Kbin and Lemmy as well. But they’re just called “tags”
Here’s my brainstorm list for grouped communities from federated instances:
Feeds Clusters Slices (slice:lemmings::pod:whales) Villages Hamlets
And/or Meta- or Mulit- prefixed to any of these…
Anyways just shouting into the void here lol. Is there a meta thread for Lemmy development? I’m not s developer so I have nothing of substance to add, just a use case to suggest as a user.
Feeds, probably. I don’t believe that there’s any meta-thread, but Lemmy does have a Matrix channel. I imagine that is where you would find that type of discussion.
#lemmy-space:matrix.org
But then you have the same problem all over again, just at a different scale. If multiple people create those feeds according to their personal tastes, how do you decide which one to use? It’s unlikely that any of them offer the content you want and nothing more, so you’d still have to tweak them to add the stuff that’s missing or remove the stuff you don’t care about. Yes, technically it’s an improvement because you no longer need to do all the work yourself, but it would still suck.
Multireddits were actually a native Reddit feature, not an RES thing. I think something else that would help is better xposting support. Right now it basically copies a link from one community to another
I think two communities can live side-by-side and even develop their own culture. With federation, someone subscribed to both essentially has no downside right? I think forcing merges would cause some issues (like, who moderates?).
It would definitely be confusing once communities start coming up with rules for posting, like one gaming community from instance A could allow memes but gaming community from Instance B doesn’t allowes, or only allows text posts, no screenshots, etc.
This will probably take care of itself with time. Not having any “official” ones dictated by some central authority is kind of the whole idea of the fediverse.
Agreed - this was my initial concern as well but now that I’ve gotten used to the structure here it doesn’t seem like an issue. The whole Digg > Reddit > “New Monolith” wasn’t ever going to solve the problem of enshittification, it would just buy us some time, and probably not much at that. This feels a necessary paradigm shift, and the multiple overlapping communities really turns into a failsafe more than an inconvenience.
They all still populate the same on a feed if you’re subbed anyway.
They don’t though, my feed of the same community looks different on each instance due to the vote counts being different
That’s a fair point - I guess all I’m saying is that they all can show up within your feed if subbed to the same communities.
Admittedly, I didn’t know there was a difference in vote counts when viewing across instances. I had assumed the votes would be synced to those accrued on the specific post’s instance but it sounds like that may not be how it is done.
Imo. This is the opposite of having a too big of a community. I think this is just a disadvantage of federation that we will eventually have to live with. The opposite is a bigger problem in my opinion, where one entity controls too much of the power.
What we really need is a better system, be it an app or chrome extension where it makes it easier for us to manage these instances version of their communities.
I don’t know what that looks like but the answer isn’t difficult to come up with because for the most part, all the lemmies will function the same as each other.
This is actually a very compelling OSS project to make. A Lemmy manager like rss readers of past.
Reddit apps already did this - where you could create a “multireddit” which was an amalgamation of various subreddits.
Ironally it looks like Lemmy actually has some sort of RSS functionality you can tap into to make that happen.
Like in the very early internet where your daily blog roll is opening the rss viewer. Everywhere on the web that updated that you subscribed to, and there are viewers that can filter and collate iirc. so your daily update is local, and you only go to the ones you are actually interested in.
Firefox rss support was removed in 2018, and lmao i only knew because i was trying to set up the rss feed from lemmy last night.
I think the real solution is to have something similar to an rss feed that can aggregate several different instances of the “same” sub. Like maybe a central server, but it only has the info to gather data from all other servers or something
I’d say it’s a problem that will solve itself. Beehaw’s gaming communities seem to be doing better than Lemmy’s, and I’d highly encourage giving them a look. Part of the greatness of the federation system is that we don’t have to host EVERYTHING locally (and it’s probably not desirable to).
After all, if Lemmy does some stuff really well, and Beehaw does some stuff really well, both of us can thrive together without both sides having to eat hosting costs for double hosting all the content.
Beehaw seems to be coming in strong. I almost made an account on their server but for some reason they don’t allow downvotes which I feel could be an issue in the future.
It might be, but a number of Reddit communities did that via CSS as well and forums before that didn’t even have voting systems at all.
Time will tell. Part of the excitement of all this is going to be watching how everything develops
Agreed.
beehaw blocks many other instances though. I don’t feel like supporting them to grow. Too centralized.
I think it will for the most part sort itself out. I do see this issue has been brought up before but didn’t get much traction.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think that something like being able to group communities by topics would help a lot. You could then just sub to all communities that are tagged with the topic, then the fragmentation really doesn’t matter nearly as much. Posts would get spread out across communities and instances (which I think is a good thing) but would still have a decent amount of visibility.
I’m seeing a lot linking other popular similar communities in a pinned post, and honestly I’m preferring it cause you can follow them all - or a more specific ‘flavour’ of it without getting all the rest. I think the nicest thing to add would be the ability to make a post across communities with features like shared comments and not showing up on the feed twice, so broader topics can still be broadly posed (and not reposted)
