This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There’s no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.
Technically, I agree.
Practically, I myself have experienced several fragmented communities about the same topic with similar ethos. This was not a healthy separation based on different norms. It was simple, ineffective fragmentation. Or, at least the ethos and norms differences wasn’t clear.
I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:
- The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn’t merge.
- One of the communities becomes the more popular “default” option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.
Even if that doesn’t happen, redundancy isn’t bad. We’ve seen how hard it is to migrate when there’s only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That’s part of why decentralization is good.
Nice thing would be to have a structured way to clearly present differences between communities of same name. Eg. possibility to link (in machine readable way) in sidebar to other communities and mark them as pure duplicates, or state the actual difference. This information could show also in search and crosspoting dialog.
“Separate conversations are splintering discourse, we should all just shout over each other in one massive wall of text!”
The separate communities across instances is a benefit of federation just like separate posts are a benefit over a single thread for everythjngs. Yes, features that allow them to be combined for those that want that way of interacting is great, but we don’t need a single news community between all instances when there are can be massive differences between instances.
Proposed solution 3: Communities following communities
The ability for communities to “subscribe” to other communities is an idea that comes from this Github comment. This is, in my opinion, the best proposed solution by far. Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.
What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on [email protected] and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!
The main proposed solution doesn’t force merging on anyone. Mods can decide whether or not they want content from other communities to show up in their space. No two news instances have to merge if they serve different audiences.
It isn’t explicitly called out in the proposal but I could easily see there being an option for mods to unlink individual posts from other communities if they get too spicy.
Exactly. This is a non issue and actually a feature.
you’re right, definitely something I hadn’t really thought about. I just don’t get the sense that some communities are intentionally spread across different instances. Like there are two Plex communities on two separate instances that basically talk about the same stuff. I guess it’s just part of getting used to things, and it throws me off a bit since I’m still new to the fediverse.
In fact, there is a problem of asymmetry of difficulty. It is much easier to start a new community, that dealing with existence of several separated communities. Especially as social solutions (eg in case that the communities are really about the same thing in the same way, asking all members to switch, so for newcomers it is easy to know which one is active and maintained).
This is solved by Piefed.
how exactly? isn’t piefed “just” another instance in the fediverse?
You have comments from different communities under the same URL post. “Multicommunities” but without user intervention.
It does have some drawbacks. For example, under this post, I can see comments from an earlier post (referring to the same URL) from over a year ago.
Piefed is also a platform, in addition to Piefed servers being instances and clients.
Got any links or docs where I can read up on that?
I would just try a piefed.social account.
The support docs don’t really look comprehensive.
done that already. :) but it looks like this only works for url-posts, which Mlem already handled pretty good before.
Mlem is an iOS client.
Crosspost comments consolidation has to happen in the default UI for everyone to be able to use it
Well no, because app users can’t use it if it is only implemented in the web UI
Mlem is an iOS client.
I was wondering what Mlem is. Thanks!
Solution 2 in the post, multicommunities. I’m not sure it actually solves the problem though, as you still have to go to the actual community to post and I imagine multicomms add an extra layer of confusion to that.
You can post from the multi community/feed, you are then asked which community you want to post to
Clicking though to community to post and selecting a community from the create post page are same problem rearranged. A user who subbed to [email protected] isn’t going to know the difference between [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].
To be honest that’s a problem that can’t be solved by tooling, it’s a human issue.
I know why there is
If people don’t want to consolidate similar communities and just keep them existing next to each other then users have to figure out the differences (sometimes there are almost none) between two communities.
Yeah, people are tribal and decentralisation lets people express that in ways centralised platforms don’t. Something, something, tech won’t save us.
Crosspost comments consolidation example: https://piefed.zip/c/fedibridge/p/794856/r-buyfromeu-asking-for-a-reddit-alternative#post_replies
I can’t follow this link while logged in to my account from feddit.org—is that what you’re saying? Piefed allows it, others not (yet, from what I’ve read and understood).
Are you using an app for Lemmy?
The link I sent should work on any browser
I used Mlem in this case. I can open the link just fine on the Web UI. What exactly am I looking at there? Sorry for asking stupid questions. I really like Lemmy and the whole idea of the Fediverse so far, I’m just trying to understand more of it.
You can see the comments of both the post on [email protected] and [email protected]
When you scroll down at some point it switches to the other post
got it now. thanks for explaining. So this works for all crossposts, same url posts, and i can combine different communities together myself? not sure about the las part.
Piefed merges comments sections on cross posts.
do you know any client that supports this?
edit: found it piefed.social/post/1258559
Wait, so am I reading correctly from the wiki page the only app that supports merging crosspost comments is Interstellar, which also doesn’t support crossposting?
Maybe I am misunderstanding something. I am on lemmy.zip, but I see communities from many different instances. How is it segregated?
For example, https://lemmy.world/c/technology, https://lemmy.zip/c/technology, and https://piefed.social/c/technology coexist. Thats what the author meant with “community separation”.
Oh, okay. Im not super familiar with how all this works. Thanks
The article does a good job breaking it down, but a short example is if you want to post about technology, you have to choose one of those communities to post to.
You can cross post or repost in the other communities but then any discussion gets fragmented, people see the same thing multiple times in their feed, only engage with one, and likely not the same one as somebody else.
On the other hand only posting in one community could significantly reduce engagement if you choose poorly.
There has never been a good blog post.
IMO, a more opionate search would fix this. Just recommend the most active community and show the others in gray.
Technically yes. The problem would be how to decide which community put in spotlight and which in grey (or any other meaningful distinction). Would it be automatic (if yes, how to decide the algorithm), or manual (if yes, how to decide how to left them). These things can be discussed out and solved, but we should be aware that these questions are here.
And it would work only for real duplicates of communities, not healthy separated communities based on actual, conscious and cherished differences.
No thanks. This is a dark pattern towards centralization. Just go back to reddit.
I’m not sure if the centralization is worse than the large portion of users on the large servers who joining copies of established communities on their own instances. Also, from my other reply:
It would force you to write a more descriptive name. Maybe we want to hide by community title and not the handle though.
Say you want to have a community for memes. It is terrible UX if you just see seven different “[email protected]” in the result. So with an opinionated search, you instead name your community Sopuli Memes, Solarpunk Memes, Programming Memes etc., or just Funny Memes Archive, and they would not be hidden.
That kills the less active ones and achieves the opposite of what Lemmy wants to do.
A lot of the “less active ones” are completely dead. Many mid-tier topics (not niche, but not “meme shitpost”) have a sea of dead communities and 1-2 active ones and it’s difficult to find them without actually clicking through the full list of results.
I think this could also be improved with a better search page, which shows how active the communities are in the search results so you don’t have to click through them all, I think v1.0 is getting that
Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It’s just clutter.
If a community was active and then isn’t, that’s fine, but a lot of communities are made and then never used.
Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It’s just clutter.
Cool, it’s a good idea. But there are also other instances.
Then there is the issue of communities with a large number of subs but where the last post was 7 months ago and they have 0 MAUs. While a community with a lot less subs can have several posts per week and at least some MAUs (couple of hundred).
Yeah, I know. That’s why I think other instances should also do it lol
And that’s exactly what the blogpost is trying to solve.
what’s a higher priority: be usable enough to attract users from other platforms or be so decentralised you can’t tell which community to post in?
Communities are organised by activity on Piefed, so you can see what people are using.
False dichotomy. Lemmy is already usable, and the decentralization is not that high that you can’t tell where to post. But if you were posting a more proper form of the question that is not trolling, maintaining a decent level of decentralization is higher priority, as it is one of the foundationally selling attributes of the Fediverse. You can add connecting tissues and UX improvements over that, but if you abandon that you are not too different from Mozilla, and become not too different from the anti-social networks this was born to serve as an alternative to.
False dichotomy. Lemmy is already usable
By whose standard?
If Lemmy is usable why is it dying?
It’s slowly declining. I don’t think it has anything to do with usability, or lack of - but simply that these platforms usually get boosted by Reddit doing a scandal rather than anything else.
simply that these platforms usually get boosted by Reddit doing a scandal
Then the question is, why is it when users come from reddit they don’t hang around? they don’t tell their friends, hey this is a place that’s awesome!
Every bit of decentralised user friction is friction that centralised platforms don’t have
I’m very happy piefed is tackling some of these bits of friction but more is needed.
Then the question is, why is it when users come from reddit they don’t hang around? they don’t tell their friends, hey this is a place that’s awesome!
Some do. I would argue that most social media websites sign-ups become dormant accounts very quickly. Whether its Reddit, a large Discord server, a reddit alternative etc. The retainment rate of most social media sites is and has always been quite bad. People are fickle, or not as interested as they thought, or just sign up to have a better look. I don’t think there’s anything special about Lemmy or Piefed here, and advertising it isn’t exactly easy nor even welcome.
Does Lemmy/Piefed have the best design? No. Is it uniquely bad? Not at all. I think Reddits is pretty poor in areas, but that doesn’t seem to be an encumbrance to it.
lemmy is dying
[citation needed]
just look at the stats ??
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48 The monthly stats don’t look too bad to me. The yearly stats are meaningless.
It would force you to write a more descriptive name. Maybe we want to hide by community title and not the handle though.
Say you want to have a community for memes. It is terrible UX if you just see seven different “[email protected]” in the result. So with an opinionated search, you instead name your community Sopuli Memes, Solarpunk Memes, Programming Memes etc., or just Funny Memes Archive, and they would not be hidden.
