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.
This 100% goes against the purpose of federation. Buy one instance, own the feddiverse.
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.
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.
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.
Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single one.
How will they merge moderation then? Every instance has their own set of rules. If it’s done automatically, it will cause a lot of trouble in a long run.
Doesn’t have to, it would just be on the user end.
Like on reddit you could do multi-reddits, for example I could type in r/anime_titties+worldnews+news and I would get posts from all 3 communities in a single feed.
@theKalash
> Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single oneI’m confused by this. I’ll admit I haven’t used Lemmy much yet, but I thought communities do exist across all servers? So if I join “c/fediverse” on any one server, and you join “c/fediverse” on any other server, we’re joining the same community. Is that not how it works?
You can have the same community on different instances.
For example !asklemmy@lemmy.world and !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Your terminology doesn’t make it clearer. Those are different communities, with different members, moderators, rules, and content. They just happen to share the name “asklemmy”, have a similar topic, and sometimes overlapping content.
I think Lemmy.world should not have 99.999% of communities.
We can have one fediverse community but it should not be on Lemmy.world. It’s already extreamly centralized with almost all users. It should have all communities as well?
I feel the same about every other duplicate community. Because i actually care about having a decentralized fediverse.
.ml also has a lot of active communities though. While I agree .ml is better than .world, feeding any one of these won’t be good for decentralization anyway.
Completely agree.
Pushing for https://lemmy.film/, literature.cafe/, https://mander.xyz/ etc. as much as I can, but the established communities usually have the natural inertia working for them.
Just picking from those two, but yes, I agree. I would put it on a instance that is below the top 10 instances, and I would do the same for all duplicate communities.
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.
Yeah, a community overrun by fash will die. Not gonna work.
