Doesn't each community being local to each instance split the audience?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.

The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.

Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.

Edit: Just found out they addressed this problem in a new version with federated communities. Well done!

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Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Welcome here !

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca can help you settle in

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- droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Sorry to inform you but you are dead posting :P
  
  This was my very first post from 2023. For some reason it’s getting comments now after I edited it. I guess that counts as new activity and it’s floating to the top of some feeds.
  
  Side note: Thank you for all the work you do blaze. You and lady butterfly.
  
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  - Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Seems like it !
    
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ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Federate communities are literally the point of lemmy. They were there from the beginning?

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fizzle@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’ve never heard of federated communities.

Keep in mind the fediverse is not lemmy. Lemmy is the software that allows you to read, post, and comment, but there are others like piefed.

The basic problem you’ve described is a potential problem, but in practice it’s not really significant.

I’ve never really cared much for the idea of “community” online and certainly on reddit. Like what is a community really other than a category of similar posts ? The idea that it’s the people that make the community and that you need one cohesive place or platform for that community to exist just isn’t accurate.

For example, every instance might have it’s own “selfhosted” community. If you search you’ll see a half dozen. Just subscribe to the few busiest like everyone else, and you’ll see all the posts. I guess what I’m saying is that “the community” informally exists across all instances.

The best thing about federation is that you can choose not to follow specific communities if you don’t want to support their content. Like maybe you’re into manga memes but you don’t want to support the lack of moderation on some instances.

I don’t know exactly how it works but piefed has a feature where if a post is a link to a news article then it will list the comment sections for all cross posts under one post. Something like that anyway, I’m not sure exactly how it works, but often when looking at a post for an article you’ll see comments from other posts of the same article.

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- HotDog7@feddit.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  if a post is a link to a news article then it will list the comment sections for all cross posts under one post.
  
  This is such an underrated feature of PieFed, and it solves OP’s problem entirely.
  
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- droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m surprised I’m getting replies to the very first post I ever made because I edited it recently. On reddit you don’t get new activity from editing. Where are you even seeing this?
  
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  - fizzle@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    What? Edited posts dont disappear.
    
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sem@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You are correctly understanding the downside of federation, i.e., instead of just having one “world news” community, you could have multiple. If you subscribe to them all, you could see duplicated posts across them all, or you might miss things if you only subscribe to one, etc.. These are the downsides.

There are upsides to this model too. Let me illustrate with a story in recent history. The mods of 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone were unhappy with some of their admin’s decisions. If this were reddit, they would be shit out of luck, because the admins are the same across all of reddit. Not so in the threadiverse! So the mods decided to hop instances to lemmy.world.

To make a long story short, now there are at least three “196” communities, with two of them thriving: the original 196, which moved back to lemmy.blahaj.zone by popular demand, the onehundredninetysix community, which sprung up by popular demand when the mods of the original comm left blahaj, and 196@lemmy.world, which was the new home of the 196 mods for a short while, and persisted amongst those who wanted to stay on lemmy.world.

I feel like I’m describing the migration of the elves in the Simarilion.

And this is not to mention how Piefed and Mbin, etc, can also have communities that split the audience.

So tl;dr, yes this splits the audience, but in the end gives communities the freedom to choose which mods and admins they want, instead of getting stuck with unpopular mods or admins.

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HotDog7@feddit.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Just found out they addressed this problem in a new version with federated communities.

Aren’t the majority of communities federated? I’m confused at what update you saw that “addressed” something that has always been a thing ever since Lemmy was created.

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- droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  nvm sry im dumb 😅
  
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