Is it worthwhile to try to get mods to combine them? It just seems like a bit of a waste when trying to grow a community and its split in two.
Or is this what the fediverse is supposed to look like?
I read before somebody said that we might be able to combine similar communities at some point but don’t know if that’s true.
I’ve been thinking about this. There are many up voted clickbait/ragebait articles on some of the popular news communities. I was considering creating a new community with specific rules about the quality of sources and non editorial titles instead of solely relying on votes. Please let me know if this already exists.
Edit: [email protected] seems to be exactly what I was after
For me it doesn’t matter. I subscribe to all the communities that interest me, no matter which instance they are on.
Yes, it’s a great thing.
In the old days of forums there were multiple forums for popular topics, so if you didn’t like one or didn’t agree with how it was moderated you had many more to choose from. It was usually friendly and you got to know all the regulars in a forum.
Next we had centralisation which lead to massive forums, resentment built up against moderators, everyone was faceless and had no sense of community, and it all basically turned in to a competition for attention.
Now we have decentralisation, we can have lots of manageable size communities again - it’s great.
@Mane25 Yeah, but it’s the pits for the smaller communities I used to use reddit for. The local-ish one had at most 300 people online at a time and most of them were lurkers. Split that into smaller groups and there isn’t enough critical mass in any one smaller group to make the communities work.
It wasn’t a problem for forums, for smaller interests there’ll be fewer forums, it’ll sort itself out.
I think so, I’ve found out quickly that the instance can add a lot of context as the instance tends to be the primary setter of the overall theme or topic, and the communities are just where they intersect. It will be interesting to see which ones get popular and which ones don’t.
We need a feature to combine several communities into a group that we can follow in our subscriptions.
Then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
What would be the difference then between subscribing to, say, 10 different communities separately, or a group of 10 communities?
If there are 5 different instances with the same community, to subscribe to all of them you have to go find them all.
If kbin had a feature to combine them in groups like this, when you went to subscribe to one version of the community, it could let you subscribe to all of them at once. Without having to hunt them down.
Yeah. I think this is a good solution. It’s then up to the user to decide if they want to combine or not.
My suggestion on GitHub was to let instance admin create a local /g/ grouping, with the freedom in how they utilise a /g/ group.
Some people argued that they should be able to make it per account, like a multireddit, but the point was for new and general users having easier access to broader fediverse content.
The instance admin would only need to do some legwork at first, then they could add to it as they go along. The barrier of entry for new users finding which communities outside of their instance is substantial.
Idk if it needs to be a server side thing or if it could be client-side
I think it’s a good thing to have more than one community devoted to a topic. I have already discovered that I don’t like this or that community on this or that instance but I like another community on another instance dedicated to the same or similar topic. People have different styles and preferences even though they have similar subjects in common. It’s like having different supermarkets or clothing stores. Some like to get their jeans at The Gap. Others prefer Levi’s. Giving users more choices is good in my experience. It used to be this way in the days of forums and usenet news groups. I think if you’re not used to it you will get used to it. It’s like shopping around for a good class at college or looking for the right pair of jeans that fits you the right way.
Question: How many posts do you view from a given subreddit in a day?
How many comments on any given post do you read?
How many people need to be in a community to generate that many posts and comments? Because communities don’t really need to be any bigger than that.
Having FOMO over what’s going on in other communities is normal, but it’s not helpful or useful. It’s not like you weren’t missing out on 99.9% of posts on big subreddits, or 99.9999999% of comments. And let’s not pretend like what floats to the top in large subs is the best content. Popularity contests are not meritocracies.
Having 1000 communities on the same topic with 1000 active users each is better than having 1 community with 1,000,000 active users. Those users are easier to moderate, they’re more likely to see other community members as people, and they’re more likely to have their posts and comments viewed and interacted with by others.
And if something really interesting is happening in another one, someone will link to it.
On top of all that, consider the context of different communities. !politics on lemmy.ca is probably going to be a very different space than on, say, murica.fuckyeah. !games is going to me a differernt things on pathfinder.social than it will on startrek.website.
Imagining that spaces with big numbers are being shattered into small clones is not the right lens to look at this from.
I don’t think so. I mean, even if an instance with an important community has a problem (e.g. goes offline) we can simply create that community on another instance, but as long as there are no problems I think it’s better to have just one community.
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I’ve found that similar communities on different instances can have VERY different experiences in terms of the community and attitude. I know I’m generalizing, but I feel a lot of Lemmy.world instances are more negative and hostile than similar instances on beehaw.org. Personally, I’d rather they stay separate. That way I can be more precise on dialing in the experience I want.
That’s exactly what happened with reddit, I think it’s better to have more than one, worst case scenario you only sub to one and if it goes down there’s a quick alternative.
Personally I sub to both and if an article repeats no big deal I just move on
I think the type of communities you want to see affects how you look at the repetition aspect.
I like to use the sports communities for news/discussion around the time an event is taking place. Following live speedy discussion doesn’t quite work as seamlessly on two different communities. You just kind of end up picking one community and post there.
I think that’s what this will turn out to be.
Can’t wait for an nsfw “awww” to be created and then see the chaos unfold when people wonder why they’re seeing pussy instead of cats.
If I subscribe to a community on one instance do I subscribe to that community on all instances?
no, only on the given instance.
No. That dude’s scenario doesn’t seem likely to happen at all. It would be funny if it did tho.
Its very easy for people to just camp on identically names communities on Lemmy.world, wait for confused newbies to their community because they’re also on lemmy.world and then the community is split (potentially no longer having mods on the new instance).
The potential lack of modding/mod engagement in the future is what concerns me most.
I think it’s fine, it will all just work out over time.
I thought about that too, but I also can see a scenario where as the userbase grows, one instance’s community is seen as the “default”. I suppose the upside is that if something happens to one instance, there will be a backup of sorts on another instance - which in a way is sort one of the points of decentralisation.
Yes, that’s a risk, but it also gives communities the opportunity to migrate to a new server in case they get captured by hostile mods.
For example, my government will have presidential elections next year, and it’s trying very hard to preemptively co-opt the corresponding subreddit with propaganda. If the sub had joined the protests and their mods removed, today it would likely be captured by government people. That won’t stop them, for example, from trying to offer money to some mods in exchange for preferential treatment, or even mod privileges, but here the competition means they won’t control the sole community with the country name.
As long as there is a way to spin up a new community if the mods go rogue, I’m okay with it.
I think that’ll always be the case with the Fediverse.
