Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on [email protected].
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 ([email protected] and [email protected] ) 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.
This would require content addressing to be robust. It’s what bluesky’s atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol
A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.
This is the best answer that we should strive towards. Deduplication and community combining. Deduplication is hard but a lot of other places have been attempting it for years so methods have already come a long way. Community combining could be done through partnered aggregation and tagging of communities
With Lemmy’s design that would most easily be done through mirroring. One main community and the rest are replicating it.
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 [email protected] or [email protected] while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
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 [email protected] or [email protected] 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.
Very good point
I agree with you completely and kinda assumed this was already in place tbh.
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.
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.
Oh, got ya! That’s a neat feature, for sure. But it doesn’t fix this concern:
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I really want (user-level) multi-communities too.
That would still create a fragmented comment situation. Ideally, the server should be aware of “sister communities”, so it could merge the comment threads, or at least tell the client to do so. But that has all kinds of moderation implications, as noted elsewhere.
In the end you’re either doing federation on community level (which would require another level of federation administration - you can’t just merge like-named communities from Any instance), or you’d have to convince 1 community to go read only and refer to the “defacto” community.
The first one has a lot of technical hurdles (servers and clients would have to adapt, and then community admins would be responsible for deciding who to federate their communities with). The second depends on mods giving up their community, which is unlikely and undesirable in case of defederation. Or option 3: keep the status quo, of course.
@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 [email protected] and [email protected]
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.
It doesn’t matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you’re “well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy,” but apparently you really haven’t thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed “we” can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.
Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.
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.
How can we force this instance to federate with everyone though? If we centralize the discussion in a single place, we would put a lot of trust into maintainers of said instance. We can build “backup” instances for that purpose, but that would destroy the initial goal - to have a single discussion place.
It’s interesting, because it can be compared to real politics where you have nations that are neutral and can serve as hosts for events where countries with completely different views and sometimes even high tensions can meet.
The League of Nations (that preceded the United Nations) used to be hosted in Switzerland, which is usually seen as a neutral ground.
Maybe we could try to have something similar? Or we can even imagine a large list of admins, all from different instances, so that everyone watches what is happening with the instance, so that no one could hijack it?
In the end, it would still be on someone’s server. And people would need to trust the owner of that server to pay, maintain and not interfere unnecessarily.
Every server is someone’s server, your point is also valid for lemmy.ml and lemmy.world as they currently exist.
Yes, but you wanted a neutral ground, and my point was that it’s hard to have something like, because in the end it would just be another server. I am not saying we don’t need a solution, I just pointing out a flaw in your proposed solution.
That’s fair, and this is why I said having an admin team composed of people from different instances would be a way to mitigate that.
Regarding costs, as it would be a content instance with only a few communities (you want everyone to be able to access the communities on that server, but without any users, this server would not have to replicate any of the other communities) the cost should be kept quite low.
Donations could come from other instances as a way to show their good faith about an open fediverse space.
I’m questioning now how the United Nations is funded, but it’s probably based on member countries donations.
I’m also curious about users. If this instance basically federates with every instance, even the most bigoted one, wouldn’t it become a host for users with maligned interests? And communities on that instance would be a very dangerous and noisy space too for the same reason.
The instance would only hosts a few communities (!fediverse, and maybe a few others).
Users would not be allowed to register there. Moderation would indeed need to be heavy, you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment (you would have to ask a moderator to open a topic. Cumbersome, but at least you prevent topic spamming).
you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment
I don’t really think this is viable. Most posts on c/fediverse, c/lemmy, c/plugins, etc. are made by users, and these are quite active communities, I doubt mods will be able to deal with the load.
That’s a fair point.
Interestingly enough, [email protected] is a good case of a single community where no other community exists on that topic, and it seems to be doing well.
No, please. Most of the defederations are for a good reason. In !fediverse@whatever I want to read about fediverse, not racist bullshit and spam.
That’s not actually how defederation works. You would still not be able to see those your instance has defederated from.
I mean, that’s exactly what I want? Defederating from the spammy and racist instnaces means I will not interact with them at all, which is what I want - I don’t want to read their racist bullshit and spam. I don’t see where I misunderstood how defederation works.
I’m saying you wouldn’t see racist bullshit and spam in !fediverse@whatever.
If there were no defederations, yeah, I would. I’ve seen racist and homophobic bullshit in a community for my instance news before I defederated.
That’s an interesting question.
I just had a look at lemmy.ml block list, and EH are blocked.
I guess at some point you just have to block the bigots.
An instance dedicated to the Fediverse would be the ideal solution.
Lemmy in general could use a lot more instances centered around specific topics.
I think this is just another variant of FOMO. You don’t need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that’s it 🤷♂️
I’m not sure it’s FOMO. The main issue I see is that communication to the audience (in this case, everyone interested in the Fediverse) is either cumbersome for the poster, or lacking for the audience.
I usually see people not knowing about some tool for Lemmy (link the instance link switcher or the account sync app) because it was posted on one community, and not the other they are following.
I agree, trying to get used to Lemmy and the amount of shit posts and low quality content can be fatiguing. Compound that with servers limiting people who can create accounts (lemmy.ml for instance) and inconsistent features for filtering/blocking memes and shit post communities on servers you don’t have an account on— it’s hard to get used to the disorganized mess.
Reddit thrived on consistent leadership within it’s communities, if you didn’t like one you could create another with clear access/visibility to the rest of the user base. If Reddit is an echo chamber, Lemmy seems to be doubly so.
There will always be people not knowing anything about any topic in a large enough group.
The poster is not responsible for the audience, just post whatever you feel like sharing and the audience will come or not.
I know this sounds like platitudes, but it is really all just variants of FOMO.
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.
Thank you for your feedback!
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.
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I find this to be more positive than negative. The tone of the entire comment section tends to be set by the first few comments meaning every post has a high risk of becoming it’s own tiny echo chamber. Spreading comments across multiple communities makes it more likely that the discussion will explore different aspects of the topic and that different opinions on the topic will be explored.
Also discussions on different instances may have different flavors: e.g., many .world users prefer to participate in local communities, while .ml is federated with beehaw and hexbear, so it’s kinda have a wider reach within threadiverse. Communities on smaller instances may be predominately populated by users of said instance.
Why do you think you need to post twice? This is what happens.
Because Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml have their own defederation lists, meaning that to reach everyone, you need to post twice.
That’s actually part of the issue I was detailing in my post.
I don’t think this matters. If they are defederated from an instance you post in, then they determined that they don’t want to see what gets posted there. Why is it so important to reach everyone?
(To be fair, I think you should be able to post the same thing 10 times if you really want to, I just wish the site I use had a feature that would just automatically pool all posts with identical headings or links into a single post, then treat it like a mini community/magazine.)
I think the issue I have is that I feel that in the last few days, the content seems more stale.
That’s why I had a look at active users and noted that we were fewer.
One potential way to address this would be to have one community to be the announcement one to the rest of the Fediverse.
Today, it feels like getting information to people is a hassle. They arrive on the platform, they subscribe to the top communities, and then what? How are they supposed to learn about LASIM, that if they move to a smaller instance for better performance they might have to ask their admin to run LCS to get a populated All feed, that they can have a look at [email protected] for rising communities?
We probably lack a reference website to answer all of these questions. But even then, due to how fast the platform evolves, we would still need a way to communicate new tools or features to most of the users.
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.
Or alternatively, all the comments across them should be visible in-line in all communities.
Either of these approaches gives the agency to users to only reply to one of the cross post and read all the opinions/thoughts on that post. At the same time, it maintains the federation philosophy by not taking a community about a topic down, if the instance fails.
It would be very beneficial to have clients that support aggregating equivalent communities from multiple instances. When viewing a post from the aggregated community there could be a section at the top saying “Viewing comments from:” and then a dropdown to choose between “all instances”, “lemmy.world”, “lemmy.ml”, etc. When viewing all comments, they would be in one combined feed, without the user needing to care about which underlying post holds the specific thread they’re looking at.
Similarly, when users post something to an aggregate community, they could select whether it’s posted to all the included communities, only one, or some specific subset.
The way i handle this is to sub to the biggest community on a given topic i can find. The exception to this is if i find a smaller community that is more active.
I just sub to them all, there’s no limit like on reddit.
The dups annoy me, otherwise i would.
You are advocating for a single point of failure.
More like a single point of discussion.
As I said elsewhere, other communities can be kept as backup if the main one is unreachable or gets compromised.
That’s already what’s happening with some communities on Lemmyworld anyway, moderators are moving them to other instances.
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 [email protected].
People on Lemmy.world don’t want to subscribe to [email protected] 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
