Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
It’s a bit worse than that actually. I’m now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn’t have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That’s going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, “Aww” gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I’ll have to subscribe to both…
I don’t get argument about duplicates. The same situation was on reddit - you’ve got few, sometimes more, subs about same topic. You could subscribe to whichever you wanted. Why on Lemmy this is suddenly a problem?
I think users are still having trouble with the mental model for browsing Lemmy.
The first interaction with the service is already fragmented - you need to choose where to create an account and start browsing. Even though you can browse communities from other servers, people are now seeing them through the lens of “fragmented” “my server vs other server” and that creates the illusion that these duplicates are somehow a huge issue.
But duplicates can actually be quite useful - a community called “memes” on Lemmy.world could attend to a different audience than a community also called “Memes” but made in an instance entirely in French.
Also, if two instances have two communities you enjoy, with the same name… Subscribe to both? Nothing stops you from doing that. It’s okay. Reddit had “me_irl” and “meirl” which were the exact same, but with different mods, a relatively similar number of subscribers and quite honestly the same content. I didn’t know the actual difference between the two, and I still do not know - I just subscribed to both and kept getting depressing memes to cry before going to sleep. No issues.
That’s a really good analogy. Still, there needs to be an easier way to search remote communities. Copy pasting community links in search bar is really clunky.
It would be really nice if the search would show all communities in federated servers, and maybe communities in servers federated with those severs, etc.
Are there ways to manage lists of such? For example, on the former platform that doesn’t deserve a call out, you can do “me_irl+meirl” and aggregate both into one feed. This makes reading the (albeit potentially cross posted) content in a unified feed much easier.
Another similar point I’m having a hard time getting over is that with a centralized platform, it is easy to go to “Subject A”, and see everything on that subject. However, now I need to see “Subject [email protected]”, “Subject [email protected]”, “Subject [email protected]”… Yes, I could subscribe to them all, but this ultimately end up creating a noisy home feed with also “Subject [email protected]”, “Subject [email protected]”, “Subject [email protected]”, “Subject [email protected]”, … etc. all baked into one feed, as opposed to just something focused on “Subject A”.
Lastly, discoverability leaves a lot of room for desire. Today, I’m fairly new to Lemmy, I am actively seeking out communities that I might be interested in, across multiple popular instances, and hoping that federation is enabled between the two instances. Tomorrow, I’d find that I’m subscribed to too many (see the noisy main feed issue above), and I’d remove a bunch. Next week, am I likely to go to the Join Lemmy directory to find new instances, and add “duplicate” communities from newly popular instances? I think not.
I think the long term survival of the platform (to expand beyond just us tech nerds that hate the former platform) will depend a lot on streamlining this workflow to make content discovery much more consistent. Even a simple option where a pseudo “!Community@” (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the “!Community” regardless of instance that you’ve subscribed to, might go a long way.
Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.
That’s lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn’t a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.
But I’m coming from reddit, and they aren’t meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I’m so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there’s bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.
I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.
Well, by just searching topics in the search bar you can typically find instances related to the search. You need to click the “chain” icon rather than the “federated star” icon to view the post “from your instance” and stay on your personal account.
Woah. I’ve been clicking the star the whole time. This may make things a looot easier.
This is a feature, not a bug. But we definitely need a solution to make subscribing/coalescing them easier for users. Mastodon allows subscribing to topics (hashtags) - I think something similar is needed here, but that will evolve naturally over time.
Yes. This is 100% necessary. Otherwise giant communities would be built and probably all on lemmy.ml
Maybe have them coalesce based on channel name, but have local mods on each server. It’d be great if you could share moderation between trusted servers or trusted mods on different servers as well (this could be on a per-community or per-server basis).
you don’t have to have an account on the same lemmy server to mod a community on it. The creator of the community can add anybody as a mod.
Well one instance shouldn’t monopolize a community. If it takes a dump on one instance at least it exists elsewhere. If I want to start up my own cat community I don’t see why that’s an issue.
I agree, I don’t particularly see this as an actual issue… Nothing stops you from subscribing to both.
Just like there could be a [email protected] and a [email protected]. Nobody is confused with emails when it comes to this… The difference is that it’s slightly more work than reddit because r/aww is one particular thing and it’s assumed we’re talking about Reddit because of it’s unique format. Here it’s just c/aww on lemmy.ml, but that’s a bit of the point of the [email protected] structure of naming.
I LOVE that there’s [email protected] and [email protected]. Different communities ran by different groups will end up with different content. Then I can shop for the content I want myself.
Nobody can singularly own the name. I always found that to be a big problem on reddit. r/trees comes to mind, if there was an actual arborist community that want r/trees, well they were fucked. And that’s kind of jacked. This way it doesn’t matter. Just pick a different instance that doesn’t already have c/trees and post there… or better, start your own instance to host it.
I don’t know… in the future people could even start up instances of lemmy on domains like lemmy.jobs, lemmy.help or lemmy.hobby to aggregate major communities based on topics. lemmy.jobs for instance could be an instance that houses professional the arborist and the domain would make it clear the intent. Or even better… drop the lemmy all together and register jobs.social or similarly descriptive domain names.
I know we’re all a hodge-podge of domains now because a lot of us are just spinning up instance on domains we already have… but the potential is there.
There was. They ended up with, I think, /r/marijuana_enthusiasts or something like that. It was quite funny to both sides, at least it was like 15 years ago.
As a former marijuanaenthusiast subscriber it was funny for about 5 minutes and then annoying for the next 10 years. I am considering making a similar community here but /c/trees has already been claimed by the other community. So I have to decide if I want to deal with the confusion or name it something else.
Yeah I can see that.
Maybe name it /c/arborists? 🤷♂️
Shame that that baggage would have to carry over, but the flip side is can you imagine the confusion if it didn’t.
This problem existed on reddit too still. You have r/games r/game r/gamers r/gamenews r/gamernews etc. All trying to do the exact same thing.
I think this comment convinced me. Because you’re right, on Reddit there were always offshoot communities that were essentially the same exact thing just of different sizes and run by different people. There’ll probably always be the “most popular” one, and then several offshoots for the same topic but perhaps a better sense of community because it’s hundreds or thousands of users vs millions or tens of millions of users.
Remembering the exact instance and community name combinations will take a little extra effort, but not significantly and subscribing negates that mostly.
The one that pissed me off a lot is the misspelling of r/politcs trying to mimic r/politics. And i messaged the mods asking why they existed and was just either oblivious or trolled with their answer of “to talk politics”.
Took me forever to realize I was subscribed to an r/mildlyinteresting and an r/mildyinteresting. Just figured they were the same thing and didn’t affect me much.
I’m not sure how this would work, but what about the concept of cross-instance communities? For users it would be a bit like a multi-reddit where you group various communities together into one aggregate list but when posting content you’d have to choose which instance it lands on. Mods would have to agree on a set of rules (and you’d have some communities split off due to differences), but otherwise it seems somewhat plausible.
That would be one way to solve the problem of every instance having a version of one specific type of community.
Yup. I think it’s fun and it makes me explore more. Makes me check out different instances and actually actively look for things I like instead of passive doomscrolling.
That’s true, and the point I guess. You sub to all relevant communities and the overlap isn’t an issue because it’s different communities with different instances making content with others interacting through federation. The “subreddit” is diversified to the top communities in all of the highest subscribed instances. It’s just the nature of the beast, but once you find all the top comms it probably doesn’t seem so bad.