Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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Comments

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jet@hackertalks.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it’s indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post

Kind of like a symbolic link

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- ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  ActivityPub wise this could be modeled pretty cleanly as (what Mastodon calls) boosts. Or perhaps quote boosts as implemented by every software except upstream Mastodon, if different comment threads are needed.
  
  Hell, let’s make cross posts work like that.
  
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- hempster@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  In the meantime, third-party apps can combine posts from multiple communities (that have the same URL) coalesced one single post, and pull comments from every instance’s post.
  
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  - ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Automatic merging of that sort is problematic as each community can have significantly different rules, conventions, moderation strictness, priorities and overall “vibe”.
    
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeap, this is the kind of improvement that needs to happen at the client level, not server.
    
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- erlend_sh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it’s indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post.
  
  This is effectively how the Community-following-Community proposal works. I’ll repost what I commented in this thread:
  
  I still believe the best solution is the ability for Communities to follow other Communities. That is essentially a fully automated version of this sibling proposal.
  
  This has been explained in great detail by ‘jamon’ here:
  
  github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecom…
  
  This basically lets Communities opt to federate directly with other Communities, abiding by the same network dynamics as the fediverse at large, I.e. cross-network moderation by (de)federation.
  
  Here’s a succinct description of the problem that C-C following solves:
  
  If you are an active user (not moderator) of Lemmy, the requirement for this becomes apparent almost immediately. One of the biggest strengths of these forum are communities-at-scale. Being able to easily post and interact with large groups of people is the benefit to the user that makes Lemmy (and all other social media) appealing.
  
  As a user, I recently wanted to post to AskLemmy. Almost every single instance has thier own separate AskLemmy implementation. Naturally, I’d tend to post to the one with the most users. But inherently, I’m missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to AskLemmy@lemmy.ml (which had 3k users), but by doing that, I’m missing out on the users from lemm.ee, behaw, lemmy.world which in total are far more than 3k.
  
  There is already a FEP for this functionality: socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…/3366?u=erlend_sh
  
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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Did I just read a complaint about cross-instance posting, that was cross-instance posted?

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- Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I wish it was. This is a disconnected duplicate, not a proper cross-post. Actual cross-posts are linked to each other in the title section, making it easier for participants to visit the other discussion(s).
  
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  - spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Important to note: linked crossposting does not currently work with discussion posts.
    
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  - can@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Do any apps support it yet?
    
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- Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Demonstration of the current issue
  
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Adderbox76@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Respectfully, who cares?

Hard truth… you’re not important. None of us are. No one cares enough about your opinions that they need you to “maximize your reach” by posting in multiple places. That is entirely a you problem, not an us problem.

No one is forcing you to post everything multiple times to multiple communities. You’re free to choose one and post to it. if it’s interesting enough, someone will likely share it to other communities. And if it isn’t interesting enough, they won’t. Simple as that.

that’s… how… it… works

Also, you talk as though browsing r/all on Reddit doesn’t also show multiple copies of the same post sent to multiple communities. Of course it does. Declaring something the “main” community isn’t going to change that anyway.

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- ZodiacSF1969@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is a really shitty way to express your disagreement.
  
  And the fragmentation is definitely an issue worth discussing. It’s a lot more prominent here, in my opinion, than reddit, and that could discourage potential users.
  
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1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Close the one on Lemmy.world to promote decentralization.

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TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
That’s part of the fediverse. It will be a obstacle for communities that will keep them from getting Reddit sized but decentralized means they aren’t supposed to get too big. I think the best compromise would be allowing you to create multi-communities on the front end or in the client.

But end users may not want to federate with Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml or overzealous moderators may ban a user on one instance and for that reason I’m not in favor of consolidating communities. I’d rather both grow organically

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- C4d@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.
  
  Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.
  
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MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I like having different communities on the same topic having completely different posts. Makes things feel less boring.

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- Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The issue is when it’s the exact same content, just duplicated, which is the case for the Fediverse ones
  
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ramble81@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As someone else mentioned, this sounds like your FOMO on your reasoning. But more than that, having a single instance would actually hit less people ultimately. What happens if the combined community is on an instance that is defederated from others? The other people won’t get or see the message. What would the alternative be? To force defederated instances to get combined communities? At that point you’re breaking the underlying nature of the Fediverse.

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LittleWizard@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think from the technical point of view, it should be possible for users to merge multiple communities into one. I think the git software could be a great template for achieving this. The admins of each community would only be responsible for their instance of the community. The same merging could apply to comments.

The big challenge however would be to automate this into a seemless experience for the user. If the goal is to attract more users, the user experience has to be on a tiktok level of simplicity.

An additional problem, where I don’t have an answer yet is: What is supposed to happen if two communities start in the same way, but develop into different directions?

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mark@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s unfortunate, but I doubt anything will be done about this. Guess we have to get used to seeing the same posts, and repeating ourselves in threads a lot.

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tjhart85@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
To be fair, to some of us this is a feature not a bug.

A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don't want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

There are smaller dedicated art focused instances popping up too. I'd expect that they're going to have a better set of conversations around those subjects than the same threads on a general instance and I don't want those mixed up.

If it's a subject I really want to see a lot of discussion about, I'll look at multiple threads... can this mean that some subjects won't have as good of a conversation because people aren't bouncing off of each other? Yeah, absolutely and that frankly SUCKS, but, as stated, it also means that some of the niche conversations have a chance to grow where they may have previously just been unseen due to how many people are talking.

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- Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
  
  Completely agree, and I mentioned that in the post as well.
  
  The issue with the current two Fediverse communities on . world and .ml is that they are pretty much the same. There is no adding values in posting and discussing the same things twice.
  
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  - tjhart85@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah, but, I don't see how that really changes anything.
    
    On a smaller instance (or one that's defederated from others ... in either direction), that might very well completely shift focuses.
    
    For the Fediverse specific community, if you want one with the most chance of getting to the developers, use the instance that they're on, otherwise, I'd think to just let the cultures develop and diverge naturally as they're likely to.
    
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infyrin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I do find the idea exhausting to register more accounts just to see content that I otherwise could see on a different instance that hasn’t been posted yet. We’re in an era of the internet where you need a stupid account just to read an article now. No more accounts, please.

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