As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
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This is that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.^
If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may “win,” you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.
You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.
🥈 take my free award. It’s yours
and my axe
this is the way
Edit: thanks for the gold!
“wholesome”
I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] etc.
If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don’t think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.
Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.
Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.
I’m not opposed to some sort of client side conglomeration, but almost every person I’m seeing isn’t looking for a tool to use on their own to customize their feed - they want every iteration of a community name automatically congealed into a single community for them to sub to a la Reddit…
Which can’t be done without a central authority. Some people argue makinf a new community which scrapes every iteration of a community name automatically, but that’s just content theft at that point.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
By people creating their own groups of subs I mean a group saved on their private app or profile, not some other huge functionality to the system creating lists that is shared publicly, that would require a central authority an major changes. Heck, an app like jerboa could probably do it itself. The people that want to migrate every iteration of a subject into one don’t get the fediverse. But being able to add like communities to a list yourself gets rid of the fractured communities downside of the fediverse. If you stumble on another community on the subject you add it to that catagory/group. It would also increase the users investment and loyalty to their account.
I thought that that was how Usenet worked: each news server would merge content from other servers into the same newsgroup, then everyone would see the same alt.urban.legends or whatever.
tl;dr I’ll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers
sign me up
I appreciate how relevant this meme is 😂
I can have my c/aww and eat it too.
You can even create an instance with a domain blackjackandhookers.xxx/c/aww !
/c/instancesifellfor
/m/instancesifellfor
!!!
Ah, dammit
I like to think of it as a bunch of Discord servers (in a way). Each server is run by the owner / their moderation and can have different channels and rules in said server.
The idea of a “super community” doesnt seem like a bad one, but I’d rather have it be an aggregation of said communities then making it all one thing.
… Like maybe super list of c/aww communities that you can subscribe to at once.
I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that “email” analogy I’ve been seeing
Email explains how instances work really well, since an email domain functions like how instances tagging does.
Communities are a different story, there isn’t a good analogue to that.
The “discord” analogy cannot explain well the accounts on different servers part. I’ll agree that the “email” one can’t really explain communities on lemmy etc.
I’m certainly not opposed to a way to make personal aggregate…things, but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever. They aren’t asking for an ability to pick and choose communities to build a personal “super community” for themselves client side, they want all the c/aww’s to be automatically pulled together by a central authority - the thing they’re fleeing and came here for the lack of.
I’ve heard people are working on 1 for 1 Reddit clones, and I’d really like to see those people just go support those projects instead of getting mad that the thing advertising a lack of central authority has no central authority and demanding devs “LiStEn To ThEiR uSeRs” and institute one.
but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever.
I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt. Coming from a centralized service means people are used to things working in a certain way, and they may just not have considered all the advantages of not being forced into a single, centralized service.
I can get that, and have been overall understanding. I’ve been trying to do my part to explain this isn’t that - it’s the uptick in hostility over it that has me irate. “I don’t get it,” “not for me,” all fine. “Devs need to make it work like Reddit or else” can fuck off.
I hear you. Yes, not a fan of people being hostile just because something is different.
I’m just hoping that people who enjoy this experience will stay and that more people who also like this experience will join, and that people who want everything to be exactly like Reddit will return to Reddit or to some Reddit-like platform that works exactly like Reddit.
Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I’ve mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.
It’ll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it’ll be your link factory
Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.
It’s similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.
/r/me_irl and /r/meirl
/r/hiphopheads and /r/rap
This isn’t new
This was my first thought. Reddit had both r/DnD and r/DungeonsAndDragons. It was fine
It’s not pointless, it’s just…not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that’s the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that’s perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don’t have to pick one and forsake all others.
In regards to your other point, It’s also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It’s a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.
I’m not talking about a central authority, im talking about an accumulation of content and voting
you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don’t have to pick one and forsake all others.
That’s one of the cons of decentralization. You take the good and the bad.
One of the pros, on that exact same hand, is if you don’t like a particular c/aww on a particular instance, you can create your own c/aww on a separate instance and give it the rules you’d like to see in a community where people post cute pictures.
I think the mistake a lot of other newbies are making is believing that this is going to be exactly like Reddit and nothing needs changing ever if we merely build it. No, it’s like Reddit, but there are key differences. And you either live with those differences and stick it out until you figure out how it works, you go find another alternative, or you go back to Reddit.
No choice is wrong. Do what works for you.
Coming back to this to say one of the major pros of federation/decentralization is the redundancy will mean you can still get content on Lemmy, even if a particular server goes down. If Reddit goes down, you have to go outside and touch grass. If a Lemmy server goes down, the grass can remain untouched. You’ll get content from other instances.
I think one point they’re trying to make is that it would be nice to have “supercommunities”, for example a kind of community that is the aggregated sum of all the individual communities it subscribes to, so for example super/aww that contains c/aww@1, c/aww@2, etc.
It’s open source, they can code this in eventually for sure. I am not making a fuss. I’m patiently waiting for the very hard working founders of Lemmy to eventually carry out the will of the community.
I can’t reply to the other comment,(my first block maybe?) but I wouldn’t hold out hope that Reddit exiles will force the devs to say fuck it and make Lemmy a Reddit clone.
Those are in the works if you want to support those, that’s not what Lemmy is for. Don’t go to a decentralized platform and demand a central authority. 🤷
EDIT: Downvote harder Reddit stans lmao
It’s not a reddit clone just because you can aggregate content, that seems like a rather narrow view. The instances could still host their own communities and the supercommunities could exist alongside one another and choose which communities would be part of them, it would just be a functionality that perhaps some users would find helpful. Wouldn’t even have to be on Lemmy but for example on kbin or another alternative.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn’t it increase the usefulness of federation since it distributes the data but allows for the communities to remain connected to each other? Couldn’t you just not partake of that feature if you’re opposed to it?
Did you not read my comment at all? I’m saying it is NOT a Reddit clone, and shouldn’t give into pressure to become one. The entire point of federation is that instances and communities exist independently of each other, but half of the comments and posts I’ve seen are just bitching there’s no central authority running the show on the system that explicitly touts it’s lack of central authority. It’s going to KFC and throwing a bitch fit they won’t serve you lasagna.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn’t it increase the usefulness of federation?
It’s a bad thing (and also not really possible) because it would require a central authority to organize that through. If you want to follow three communities…Just follow three communities. It’s not that hard.
You left Reddit because of the actions of a central authority, went to an alternative that advertises the lack thereof, then cried that there’s no central authority. It’s fine if you want that, but GO TO ONE OF THOSE OPTIONS instead of demanding devs toss their vision out the window for your comfort.
A possible better solution might be to allow the user to create their own group (or super community if you prefer that name) where they can group multiple communities together in a way they see fit (not just necessarily clones of the same community. Examples could be a sports group that allows you to group together communities for all the teams you follow).
This would be beneficial I feel for most users, doesn’t affect decentralization, doesn’t require a central authority and would be only relevant to each individual user and not applied to anyone else
Nah, it’s more than that. It’s a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.
It doesn’t start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you’re suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs
Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.
At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place
There’s also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you’re going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don’t want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they’re going to ruin things
I mean, there’s also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they’re not cut off from the network, but the instances don’t talk directly to each other anymore.
And while we’re very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.
I’d like to see science and technology go in that direction because I’ll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it’s easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization
Doubly awesome - not only can you subscribe to both versions of said /c/aww on (most) any server, you will see the content inline with your normal feed so it’s effectively just several versions of the same thing.
How do I search the various instances?
I’m not sure if there’s a better way, but I found this: https://browse.feddit.de/
It crawls most of the instances and lets you search for communities across all of them.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities is also good
Thanks! I hadn’t seen that list yet, it looks pretty good too. Hopefully something similar to either of these options will be included in a future release.
I just sub to both if I run into a sublemmy collision where both are sizable. It is a little weird and I’d like to see some clean way to merge them in the future (i.e. with content migration and redirects), but for now it is what it is.
I think two communities can live side-by-side and even develop their own culture. With federation, someone subscribed to both essentially has no downside right? I think forcing merges would cause some issues (like, who moderates?).
Now what we need are concatenated multi-communities where I can have a linkable collection of each of these overlapping subscriptions at multiple federated instances. In RES they were “multi-reddits” and they were my primary way of compartmentalizing and consuming content.
I suggested this in a different thread, but I think it would be cool to be able to create and share feeds surrounding a topic. All the posts from the communities that are included in the feed show up there, and you can share that feed with other people so they don’t need to do all the hard work of discovery themselves.
Surely the devs are already looking at something like this.
What would you call them?
I know on Kbin instances you can group feed with hashtags, which can group posts, magazines (“communities” on Lemmy), miniblogs under the same feed, and will fetch from other protocols beside Kbin and Lemmy as well. But they’re just called “tags”
Here’s my brainstorm list for grouped communities from federated instances:
Feeds
Clusters
Slices (slice:lemmings::pod:whales)
Villages
Hamlets
And/or Meta- or Mulit- prefixed to any of these…
Anyways just shouting into the void here lol. Is there a meta thread for Lemmy development? I’m not s developer so I have nothing of substance to add, just a use case to suggest as a user.
Feeds, probably. I don’t believe that there’s any meta-thread, but Lemmy does have a Matrix channel. I imagine that is where you would find that type of discussion.
#lemmy-space:matrix.org
But then you have the same problem all over again, just at a different scale. If multiple people create those feeds according to their personal tastes, how do you decide which one to use? It’s unlikely that any of them offer the content you want and nothing more, so you’d still have to tweak them to add the stuff that’s missing or remove the stuff you don’t care about. Yes, technically it’s an improvement because you no longer need to do all the work yourself, but it would still suck.
True enough. In any case, it would be beneficial from a UX standpoint to have something that lets users combine the feeds of multiple communities into one. I think there’s probably something clever that can be done (or maybe something simple, this likely doesn’t need to be overly complex) to solve this, I’m just too tired to really give it the thought it deserves.
Multireddits were actually a native Reddit feature, not an RES thing. I think something else that would help is better xposting support. Right now it basically copies a link from one community to another
It would definitely be confusing once communities start coming up with rules for posting, like one gaming community from instance A could allow memes but gaming community from Instance B doesn’t allowes, or only allows text posts, no screenshots, etc.
The lemmy ui could add a way to group communities at the user level. Something like multi reddits.
I’d say it’s a problem that will solve itself. Beehaw’s gaming communities seem to be doing better than Lemmy’s, and I’d highly encourage giving them a look. Part of the greatness of the federation system is that we don’t have to host EVERYTHING locally (and it’s probably not desirable to).
After all, if Lemmy does some stuff really well, and Beehaw does some stuff really well, both of us can thrive together without both sides having to eat hosting costs for double hosting all the content.
Beehaw seems to be coming in strong. I almost made an account on their server but for some reason they don’t allow downvotes which I feel could be an issue in the future.
It might be, but a number of Reddit communities did that via CSS as well and forums before that didn’t even have voting systems at all.
Time will tell. Part of the excitement of all this is going to be watching how everything develops
beehaw blocks many other instances though. I don’t feel like supporting them to grow. Too centralized.
reddit also had that a bunch of places, for example /r/gaming /r/games /r/truegaming.
I hear there’s also eight or nine cat related subs
I’m on Fediverse for few years and reading all the replies here I find it … sad? Funny? I really don’t know what to think of this. It looks like for many people the biggest disadvantage of federation is federation itself … It feels like people want the centralization and don’t want to have options (or rather think about the options)
Or is it an age thing? I’m kind of used to lurk the internet and find what I want. But I can imagine that people raised on f.e. Netflix, Amazon where it’s like “BAM! Here you have everything” aren’t used to this
I work in a space adjacent to change management (ERP implementation) and honestly, be happy and kind. These questions are the absolute default ones of humans attempting to puzzle out a paradigm shift. And the fact they’re here and they’re feeling loved enough to actually ask for help with their new mental model of it is about eight degrees better than it could have been.
So my answer is: it’s just like r/games, r/gaming, r/videogames, r/patientgamers. They are all the same subject matter with overlapping content and userbases, with potentially wildly different moderation biases and groupthinks. And that was all on one centralised Reddit! You subbed to some, or all of them, as you saw fit, you maybe even managed a multireddit to group them! It’s just the same here except they’re on different instances and soon, enhancements to Lemmy pending, will be just as seamless to manage.
I keep having this image of the owner of a small cottage who has gradually been making his cottage lovely, repairing bits, adding cozy furniture, hanging out with his friends playing his ukulele on the porch.
The huge apartment building down the road burns down, and he invites the huge crowd of refugees into his cottage for shelter. They immediately start complaining that his cottage is too small, it doesn’t have an elevator, how come there’s no exercise room, ewww there’s cat hair on this rocking chair, that color of paint sucks, how could you be so stupid as to have a slow cooker in your kitchen, we need to add on so tell your friends to get off the porch so we can turn it into a sexy new studio……
And then they build their own cottages, and mcmansions, and apartment blocks, along with all the noise and detritus… and now your cozy little cottage is just a house in bustling village
Ah, but we like a bustling village. We want a bustling village! That means more friends to visit our porch, and more porches for us to go visit. (Village = Fediverse)
Take shelter in my cottage, be kind, get your feet back under you. When you’ve caught your breath start building your cottage/McMansion/apartment block. Ask the neighbors for help, they like helping. When you’ve got yours built and you’ve moved in, come join the porch parties and have a celebratory beer or glass of wine or cup of tea!
(really pushing the metaphor, I know… humor me!)
I think it’s just as simple as:
Most people want the decentralisation perk of not having a single profit driven company controlling everything, and that is where it ends.
Other than that, people would rather just have everything in one place where everyone is, but of course that is antithesis to the whole decentralised model.
People have gotten used to the convenience and ease of the silos, and people don’t want that taken away.
I think it will for the most part sort itself out. I do see this issue has been brought up before but didn’t get much traction.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think that something like being able to group communities by topics would help a lot. You could then just sub to all communities that are tagged with the topic, then the fragmentation really doesn’t matter nearly as much. Posts would get spread out across communities and instances (which I think is a good thing) but would still have a decent amount of visibility.
I’m seeing a lot linking other popular similar communities in a pinned post, and honestly I’m preferring it cause you can follow them all - or a more specific ‘flavour’ of it without getting all the rest. I think the nicest thing to add would be the ability to make a post across communities with features like shared comments and not showing up on the feed twice, so broader topics can still be broadly posed (and not reposted)
I just collect them like candy. Oh, another tech board? Added.
I don’t particularly care which community a post comes from. Subbing for me is so I am made aware of their posts. I honestly don’t care where it was posted.
I would love for instances focused on their own topics. mandra.xyz is all about science and exploration. The only reason we dont have a gaming focused instance is that we simply havent done it
My proposed solution to this issue is a way to group subscribed channels. Like if I sub to x number of Games communities I wish I could drop them all in a folder labeled Games so I could browse all of those posts in one spot.
UI would be like Communities -> Subscribed (All) -> “Individual” folder hierarchy containing w/e you want.
Maybe some functionality could be added to enable redirecting your local instance community to the more popular one? Is there any downside to something like that?
This will probably take care of itself with time. Not having any “official” ones dictated by some central authority is kind of the whole idea of the fediverse.
Agreed - this was my initial concern as well but now that I’ve gotten used to the structure here it doesn’t seem like an issue. The whole Digg > Reddit > “New Monolith” wasn’t ever going to solve the problem of enshittification, it would just buy us some time, and probably not much at that. This feels a necessary paradigm shift, and the multiple overlapping communities really turns into a failsafe more than an inconvenience.
They all still populate the same on a feed if you’re subbed anyway.
They don’t though, my feed of the same community looks different on each instance due to the vote counts being different
That’s a fair point - I guess all I’m saying is that they all can show up within your feed if subbed to the same communities.
Admittedly, I didn’t know there was a difference in vote counts when viewing across instances. I had assumed the votes would be synced to those accrued on the specific post’s instance but it sounds like that may not be how it is done.
This is a nothing burger. Who cares if there’s a hundred different cat instances. That’s already what it was.
There can only be one orange cat instance? Give it a fucking break
I largely agree with you, there’s already redundant subreddits and such.
But I think when we’re trying to capture a ton of Reddit users, anything that represents a hurdle to new user adoption is a concern. That goes double for things that are intrinsic to the Fediverse that aren’t intuitive to new users like myself.
We just need a more user-friendly way for all the !gaming instances to be grouped together, with users having the control of adding/removing what makes up their personal !gaming on their chosen fediverse instance.
Yeah I this is my biggest problem, and there’s always like 30 people saying “it’s not a problem, it’s a feature!”
Either they are in denial or I’m just completely incompatible with federation.
Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing? If I wanted to consume content from all of them sure, I could follow all 100 but that is so tedious. Plus what if I wanted to interact with them? I’d have to ask the same question 100 times!
Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing?
I believe over time it’ll sort out and one community will be dominant. But the reason you want this is so whoever got c/canada won’t be dominant. If the mod of c/canada was a QAnon lizardpeople nut, you wouldn’t need to make c/RealCanada because there’s not a single real c/canada. You would make c/[email protected]
But also, many communities were spread out even in reddit. Like r/traa and r/egg_irl.
The reason you want a 100 communities over one is what is happening over on Reddit. Make one big thing, and greed will take over. Make many smaller ones? Is significantly less likely to happen.
The communities are also significantly less likely to grow. It’s a double edged sword.
I think both sides have a point here, there are clear positives to federation and clear negatives. I hope a lot of the negatives can be overcome by streamlining the user interface and better apps.
Tbh this isn’t even unique to Lemmy. Even on reddit, creating a new subreddit is free. If you don’t like the moderation or the general vibe of a subreddit, create a new one and build the community that you like. with the ethos that you see fit. That’s how there’s r/gaming, r/truegaming, r/games, r/pcgaming, r/gamernews, etc.
Reddit also only allowed comments in 2008, and Digg v4 was released in 2010. Therefore much of the reddit “canon” was developed after the Digg migration (e.g. today you tomorrow me, cumbox, forthewolfx, swamps of Dagobah, discoball, jolly ranchers, double dick dude, taco show, broken arms). Digg didn’t have custom communities. Reddit did. And now Lemmy has custom communities in infinite instances. If there’s going to be a Quit Reddit Day (maybe July 1st?) like Quit Digg Day, we’re in the forefront of shaping Lemmy.
I don’t think it’s a problem or a feature. It’s exactly what we saw on Reddit before it grew. It’s not like Reddit had a limit on the number of subreddits a topic could have. As far as I’m concerned it’ll eventually sort itself out just like it did on Reddit. It’ll just take time to establish which communities are the largest. Eventually people will stop posting/subscribing to the communities that don’t have as many people, and the largest one(s) will win out, just like they did on Reddit. This is an issue that requires patience. In the meantime, subscribe to them all and post to the one that has the most subscribers just like you would on Reddit if there wasn’t a clear central community.
