Honest thoughts: I think fractured communities are what’s causing the issue.
You end up with the same post on 5 different instances, each with a fraction of the engagement it would get in one place.
I wonder if some way of federating communities might be a better way, eg, c/photograohy could exist on both lemmy.world and lemm.ee, have submissions and comments from both.
Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.
I dislike that idea. It brings a lot of messyness if the only mod on one server is asleep, etc.
Im not sure if one god owner of a “federated community” is the right answer. But i do think nods across multiple servers is the right answer? Perhaps giving all individual server community owners equal powers is a good choice?
Edit: Maybe it’s something server admins could do? “Hey, c/photography, is now an alias for photography@lemm.ee”. Maybe if they decide to unalias it, the local photography becomes a mirror of the remote instance. Then local users could interact as normal, and the remote instance would see incoming users acting as normal remote users?
I think the balance between “sovereign communities”, benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.
Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):
What I described before as “federated collectives”. New communities can join a collective by asking the others. Maybe there will be a user-weighted vote on this or some other governance mechanism, or maybe it will be consensus-based. Communities can be kicked out of collectives by the same mechanisms or leave on their own. The collective can decide whether mutual mod actions are allowed or not.
“Colonial-style” relationships. One “empire” community has powers over other “colony” communities. The empire’s mods can (maybe) perform mod actions on colony communities but not vice versa. Colonies can declare independence or the empire can kick them out. Colonies can join only by asking the empire to accept them.
“Roman Republic collectives”: Mods (or active users?) of communities elect a board of prefects for the collective. Prefects (maybe) get mod powers on all communities. The prefects can vote to accept new communities or kick others out. Maybe they can get other management powers too. The “benevolent dictatorship” case is just a special case of Roman Republic where the number of prefects is 1
Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.
Ya’ll are basically talking about how Lemmy works already. You have c/photography on Lemmy.ml. And while you’re logged into Lemmy.world, it’s c/photography@lemmy.ml.
You subscribe on Lemmy.world and comment on Lemmy.world and everything is synced. If Lemmy.ml is down, you can still see everything and comment from Lemmy.world and itll sync once Lemmy.ml is back online.
If you’re talking about communities existing on each instance, ie lemmy.world/c/photography and lemmy.ml/c/photography then yeah, those won’t sync. But the users need to coalesce around once of those, say the lemmy.ml one, then when you go to lemmy.world/c/photography@lemmy.ml. The duplicate communities is no different than Reddit having 2 similar subreddits.
That’s not what they’re talking about, though. What they’re wanting is something that would, for example, combine the feeds for c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world into one collective c/photography.
The only effect of this is to have numerous separately moderated communities
That’s… already the case? c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world, again for example, are already separately moderated communities. The only thing this would change is that instead of subscribing to both individually and seeing their content separately, you could subscribe to a collective c/photography that would show you content from both communities.
I think the user’s just need to coalesce around a single instance’s community and let the other ones go away. Don’t treat each instance’s version of a community the same. Subscribe to the one that has the most users (or best mods) and let the other ones die.
It’s no different than reddit having multiple subreddits with similar themes. r/xbox vs r/xboxone for instance. If I’m looking to subscribe to one, I will look at the subreddit with the most users and ignore the other one.
This is what I do too, but doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose of the fediverse? Naturally the communities on the largest instances will have the most users. I realize this shouldn’t need to be the case but after several months using lemmy it clearly is the case.
If everything settles down onto 2-3 monolithic instances, aren’t we just back to a slightly worse reddit?
Well, as a Lemmy pioneer, you are a part of the user’s that decides which instance’s community wins. Quit supporting all instance’s versions of the same community. Choose one, and if a different one wins out, switch.
So, as a new user to Lemmy: i have to go and hunt down all the cool communities, not just within my own instance (akin to reddit) but across the fediverse?
The only annoying part about it (and believe me, it is certainly annoying) is trying to subscribe to a community that no one on your home instance has subscribed to yet. I don’t think I ever got it to work. The UX of that needs to be improved, definitely. But once your instance has at least one person subscribed to a community your instance “knows” about it and it shows up in the search (and “r/all”, not sure what to call it on Lemmy) just like everything else on your instance.
So no, it’s really not all that different except for brand new communities no one on your instance has subscribed to yet.
I think since you are the one who finds it to be shitty UX perhaps you could propose something. And since lemmy is opensource, you can have a look at where the hooks are needed to enable the proposed solution.
The large number of upvotes suggest I’m not alone in my thinking.
I could take a look at how to enable this solution, I might even get away with doing it myself, but finding the right solution that makes things actually better is more important right now.
If we want the flexibility of not being beholden to a monolith of mods like reddit, then we have to accept the consequence that anyone can create a community anywhere.
It’s not hard to search the fediverse, just takes effort to filter. In fact, the great overwhelming volume we get from it is testament to how much better this is than reddit.
Im here because im making a conscious effort because reddit is descending into “crypto moderator damnation bullshittery,” not because it has cemented itself into habituality yet.
And im not sure it will at this rate, and that oeaves a goant stinking hole in my online habits of “using reddit but I’d really rather not be”.
That’s no different than Reddit. You want to follow a hobby on Reddit, you need to find the specific community that is most popular even though there could be thousands.
I think the better solution would be something like collections that dedup or crosspost them - both pics on lemmy.world and lemm.ee could exist in a collection. For that matter, it would solve the fractured communities as well as the “far too niche communities for such a small userbase” issue. Pics collection could include pics, photography, black&whitepics, etc.
(I have no idea technically how this would work or even if it could)
Who would set up, maintain, and police these collections?
Would the end goal be a collection of every c/photography community across the fediverse in one collection? How would you prevent someone from blogspaming their links to every individual community?
As with any technical implementation: The tech side is almost always far easier than trying to come up with a “good” or “right” solution.
I have no idea, i imagine it would be like a multireddit. The initial creator curates it, but the mods of the communities admin. Copies can be made if you don’t like the original collection, or its been abandoned?
I would hope a collection would have a bit more deduping/crossposted logic?
But i could see even having it so you can post to a collection- but before posting, it asks you which community fits best (ranks similar names by subscribers) this way you post to the most popular one. This should naturally make the user base gravitate to one or another.
I might be a dev, but I’m dev enough to understand it’s actually about communication and understanding the problem and not writing code. Writing code is pretty easy by comparison.
I think collections are a good and useful feature on their own merit, I’m not sure if they’ll solve the fragmented communities issue.
If my problem is that a single article is being posted to 5 different photography community, and each with 2 comments, well, now I can see them together, but people are still not talking to each other. Social media platforms live and die by users talking to each other IMO.
Good points/explanation about the fragmentation breaking the communication.
Hmm, not sure if we can take any active position toward “fixing”, since it’s really hard to predict the outcome of our actions. Perhaps this is something that will continue to mature as communities coalesce.
I think I’d still like the ability to build my own in-app filters that aggregate communities. Like you’d do with a podcast app. Then at least (for an individual) you’d see all the posts that you consider related in a single feed/folder/view.
Honest thoughts: I think fractured communities are what’s causing the issue.
You end up with the same post on 5 different instances, each with a fraction of the engagement it would get in one place.
I wonder if some way of federating communities might be a better way, eg, c/photograohy could exist on both lemmy.world and lemm.ee, have submissions and comments from both.
If one of them is down we see half the posts but they should be together and one. Hopefully the mods won’t get a power trip and try to make separate
Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.
I dislike that idea. It brings a lot of messyness if the only mod on one server is asleep, etc.
Im not sure if one god owner of a “federated community” is the right answer. But i do think nods across multiple servers is the right answer? Perhaps giving all individual server community owners equal powers is a good choice?
Edit: Maybe it’s something server admins could do? “Hey, c/photography, is now an alias for photography@lemm.ee”. Maybe if they decide to unalias it, the local photography becomes a mirror of the remote instance. Then local users could interact as normal, and the remote instance would see incoming users acting as normal remote users?
I think the balance between “sovereign communities”, benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.
Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):
Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.
Ya’ll are basically talking about how Lemmy works already. You have c/photography on Lemmy.ml. And while you’re logged into Lemmy.world, it’s c/photography@lemmy.ml.
You subscribe on Lemmy.world and comment on Lemmy.world and everything is synced. If Lemmy.ml is down, you can still see everything and comment from Lemmy.world and itll sync once Lemmy.ml is back online.
I mean, yea that makes sense but I see a ton of dup communities that don’t seem even remotely synced up…I could be wrong but yea 🤔
If you’re talking about communities existing on each instance, ie lemmy.world/c/photography and lemmy.ml/c/photography then yeah, those won’t sync. But the users need to coalesce around once of those, say the lemmy.ml one, then when you go to lemmy.world/c/photography@lemmy.ml. The duplicate communities is no different than Reddit having 2 similar subreddits.
That’s not what they’re talking about, though. What they’re wanting is something that would, for example, combine the feeds for c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world into one collective c/photography.
That’s just unnecessary, though. The only effect of this is to have numerous separately moderated communities, which sounds like a nightmare to me.
That’s… already the case? c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world, again for example, are already separately moderated communities. The only thing this would change is that instead of subscribing to both individually and seeing their content separately, you could subscribe to a collective c/photography that would show you content from both communities.
I guess what you’re looking for is the equivalent of a multireddit.
That’s why i changed my wording part way through to “Alias.” Allowing someone to say, “this name actually refers to an offer server name.”
This means that the shitty UX of searching for cool communities is marginally better.
I think the user’s just need to coalesce around a single instance’s community and let the other ones go away. Don’t treat each instance’s version of a community the same. Subscribe to the one that has the most users (or best mods) and let the other ones die.
It’s no different than reddit having multiple subreddits with similar themes. r/xbox vs r/xboxone for instance. If I’m looking to subscribe to one, I will look at the subreddit with the most users and ignore the other one.
This is what I do too, but doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose of the fediverse? Naturally the communities on the largest instances will have the most users. I realize this shouldn’t need to be the case but after several months using lemmy it clearly is the case.
If everything settles down onto 2-3 monolithic instances, aren’t we just back to a slightly worse reddit?
2-3 monolithic instances is probably inevitable for general usage. And also, this is 100% better than a single privately controlled corporation.
There are also niche instances where specific communities may fit better on than the general instances.
And also, if the 2-3 monolithic instances start fucking around, there are plenty of alternate instances we can migrate to.
How long do I wait?
Well, as a Lemmy pioneer, you are a part of the user’s that decides which instance’s community wins. Quit supporting all instance’s versions of the same community. Choose one, and if a different one wins out, switch.
So, as a new user to Lemmy: i have to go and hunt down all the cool communities, not just within my own instance (akin to reddit) but across the fediverse?
That’s some shitty UX. We can do better.
It’s not really all that different.
Please, propose an aternative.
The only annoying part about it (and believe me, it is certainly annoying) is trying to subscribe to a community that no one on your home instance has subscribed to yet. I don’t think I ever got it to work. The UX of that needs to be improved, definitely. But once your instance has at least one person subscribed to a community your instance “knows” about it and it shows up in the search (and “r/all”, not sure what to call it on Lemmy) just like everything else on your instance.
So no, it’s really not all that different except for brand new communities no one on your instance has subscribed to yet.
I think since you are the one who finds it to be shitty UX perhaps you could propose something. And since lemmy is opensource, you can have a look at where the hooks are needed to enable the proposed solution.
The large number of upvotes suggest I’m not alone in my thinking.
I could take a look at how to enable this solution, I might even get away with doing it myself, but finding the right solution that makes things actually better is more important right now.
Tradeoffs.
If we want the flexibility of not being beholden to a monolith of mods like reddit, then we have to accept the consequence that anyone can create a community anywhere.
It’s not hard to search the fediverse, just takes effort to filter. In fact, the great overwhelming volume we get from it is testament to how much better this is than reddit.
Seems to me you’re tilting at windmills.
At what point would that trade of be not worth it?
Right now in my head, it seems that too many communities are being started, and for most interests there is no clear “winning” community.
Huh?
You’re here aren’t you? I think that says you consider the tradeoffs worth it.
Im here because im making a conscious effort because reddit is descending into “crypto moderator damnation bullshittery,” not because it has cemented itself into habituality yet.
And im not sure it will at this rate, and that oeaves a goant stinking hole in my online habits of “using reddit but I’d really rather not be”.
That’s no different than Reddit. You want to follow a hobby on Reddit, you need to find the specific community that is most popular even though there could be thousands.
I think the better solution would be something like collections that dedup or crosspost them - both pics on lemmy.world and lemm.ee could exist in a collection. For that matter, it would solve the fractured communities as well as the “far too niche communities for such a small userbase” issue. Pics collection could include pics, photography, black&whitepics, etc.
(I have no idea technically how this would work or even if it could)
Who would set up, maintain, and police these collections?
Would the end goal be a collection of every c/photography community across the fediverse in one collection? How would you prevent someone from blogspaming their links to every individual community?
As with any technical implementation: The tech side is almost always far easier than trying to come up with a “good” or “right” solution.
Deduping the same post or link is easy. The same image… there are ways. Images modified to look different, that’s where the trouble would start.
I have no idea, i imagine it would be like a multireddit. The initial creator curates it, but the mods of the communities admin. Copies can be made if you don’t like the original collection, or its been abandoned?
I would hope a collection would have a bit more deduping/crossposted logic?
But i could see even having it so you can post to a collection- but before posting, it asks you which community fits best (ranks similar names by subscribers) this way you post to the most popular one. This should naturally make the user base gravitate to one or another.
Couldn’t we do collections within an app on a per-user basis?
Like I could create a collection of different communities that I see as having some commonality, then it’s only a view for me.
But I’m no dev, so take that into consideration.
I might be a dev, but I’m dev enough to understand it’s actually about communication and understanding the problem and not writing code. Writing code is pretty easy by comparison.
I think collections are a good and useful feature on their own merit, I’m not sure if they’ll solve the fragmented communities issue.
If my problem is that a single article is being posted to 5 different photography community, and each with 2 comments, well, now I can see them together, but people are still not talking to each other. Social media platforms live and die by users talking to each other IMO.
Good points/explanation about the fragmentation breaking the communication.
Hmm, not sure if we can take any active position toward “fixing”, since it’s really hard to predict the outcome of our actions. Perhaps this is something that will continue to mature as communities coalesce.
I think I’d still like the ability to build my own in-app filters that aggregate communities. Like you’d do with a podcast app. Then at least (for an individual) you’d see all the posts that you consider related in a single feed/folder/view.
It’s definitely not a simple problem.
I 100% agree with this!