Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.
There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.
A cool feature would be an opt in community federation. So two aligned communities on different instances can "friend" each other and will be synonymous. If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.
Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
No, this would be just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, a single monolithic social media website. That one instance would have higher running costs, and also greater power and influence and would be able to shape the narrative on controversial issues.
As as I said just below, I didn’t mean to have every community on that instance.
Just to have a single Fediverse community on one instance that could be used by everyone. You wouldn't have user registration on that instance, and as such it would not have to replicate any of the other communities except the local !fediverse one.
People shut down / buy out that server? The community falls back on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
It's kind of similar to what people are trying to achieve with lemmy.film: a single instance on one topic, federated with as much instances as possible. To get discussions in one active place rather than scattered across dozens of communities.
Spreading communities across as many instances as possible is no doubt a good thing, but it doesn’t really solve the forking problem, and “the community can fall back on x or y to figure out what to do” demonstrates that pretty well - if a third instance is set up to replace those two communities, then that third instance breaks down, which of the two (or, let’s be honest, more than two) different instances/communities are used as the fall back, and how is that communicated to users who likely don’t even understand federation?
For federated communities to win out over monolithic platforms, they really need to reduce the power held over communities by the instance administrators - seamless migration of communities and user profiles between instances is a major gap in Lemmy - and make it almost completely transparent to the user. The user shouldn’t really at any point see much of a difference between Lemmy and Reddit, for example.
I agree with you completely and kinda assumed this was already in place tbh.
Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.
I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
I'm subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it's a bit annoying. But it's also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don't, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
This seems to be an issue we should probably discuss, as it may prevent growth of the platform if most of the new joiners face it.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
Not trying to be mean, but ... you're making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D
In these other posts, a frequent answer is: Reddit isn't that much different. A popular example is /r/gaming or /r/games or whatever. Apparently there are multiple subs for the same topic, sometimes with little to no differences.
Then some people object "but that's not the same, they have different names", to which others reply "on lemmy, the full name includes the instance, so we don't have same name communities here, either".
I think, bottom line, the two platforms aren't very different in this regard. On both, users can create new subs/comms even if the exact same content already exists. And they do. Sometimes both survive, sometimes not. On both, users decide "with their feet".
One relevant difference might be that in the Fediverse, redundancy actually has value. It protects against defederation, unstable servers, servers disappearing.
I still see value in combining duplicates. When I see a new community popping up, and I know a very similar thing already exists, I might leave a note in the new community wether they might want to participate in the other community instead. Just in case they were not aware it exists.
But aside from the Fediverse-specific reasons for duplicates, there are additional general reasons, which is why we see the same phenomenon on reddit. For example, people might dislike the moderation in the 'original'. Or one might allow bots, the other not.
While this is my point of view ("it's a non-issue"), I also note it's a topic which is frequently brought up. Apparently, it's frequently seen as an issue. This may be rooted in perception (including the fact that reddit is monolithic, falsly leading to the misconception it would only have one sub for one topic, all while it still has plenty of redundant duplicates) and communication (I got the feeling the fediverse's federated structure is sometimes over-emphasized and creates more worries than necessary).
We probably will get technical solutions like grouping on a user-view level. Maybe some apps already have that. GitHub issues exist.
Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet. It is of course perfectly fine to address and re-address the topic. This might help consolidate similar communities. Personally, I think having a few redundant communities is healthy for the nature of the fediverse.
Not trying to be mean, but … you’re making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D
I'm trying to prevent a scenario that I see could happen: Lemmy stays stuck in its current state for a while, most of the users are leaving because the content is hard to get to, partially due to the number of redundant communities.
Lemmy's userbase keeps focused on the usual 4 core topics: news, memes, tech, foss.
The userbase shrinks back to what it was before the Reddit API changes, hence under 5 thousands monthly active users, talking about this 4 core topics. Most of the enthusiasts go back to Reddit using Rrvanced apps or other tricks.
Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet.
They can, but I'm always afraid they leave Lemmy altogether rather than just a few communities.
It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.
I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.
Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
Part of beauty of federation is that you people see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
Due to defederation policies, it is required to reach everyone.
Hexbear, the 8th largest instance in the fediverse, cannot see fediverse@lemmy.world.
People on Lemmy.world don't want to subscribe to fediverse@lemmy.ml because they want to boycott the Lemmy admins
Audience fragmentation is real.
as lemmy grows and or stabilises some communities will get bigger and more mainstream
Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice.
Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation.
That's exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
OK, so defederation causes the problem. Having a unique community cannot solve that. But I'll forgive you for posting twice, if that is the reason.
As discussed elsewhere, having some kind of neutral instance with no user, a single !lemmy or !fediverse community, federated with everyone, could be a solution to this specific issue. Hard to implement, but on paper an interesting idea.
Think United Nations applied to Lemmy.
I feel like it's more of a client issue than a Lemmy issue. We could imagine having clients that correctly support crossposting by having tabs for each comment section.
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
After this needless, patronizing comment I lost interest in discussing the subject with you.
Sorry for that, but I got a few toxic comments in my last thread, and would like to avoid that here.
Have a good one
I think users should always join the biggest communities, to avoid replicating data and fragment communities.
If an instance is decommissioned, all of its communities are lost. It is mitigated by the fact that no single instance hosts all communities.
The design is not perfect but this is how ActivityPub is designed.
