There’s been an ongoing debate about whether communities should combine or stay separate. Both have significant disadvantages and advantages:
Combine:
- Network effects. Smaller communities become viable if they pool together their userbase. Communities with more people (up to a point!) are generally more useful and fun.
- Discoverability. Right now, I might stumble on a 50 subscriber community and not realize everyone has abandoned it for the lively 500 subscriber community somewhere else, maybe with a totally different name.
Separate:
- Redundancy. If a community goes down, or an instance is taken down, people can easily move over.
- Diffusion of political power. Users can choose a different community or instance if the current one doesn’t suit them. Mods are less likely to get drunk on power if they have real competition.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I just want to show that each side has significant advantages over the other.
Sibling communities:
To have some of the advantages of both approaches, how about we have official “sibling communities”? For example, sign up for fediverse@lemmy.world and, along the top, it lists fediverse@lemmy.ml as a sibling community.
- When you post, you have an easily accessible option to cross-post automatically to all sibling communities. You can also set it so that only the main post allows comments, to aggregate all comments to just one post, if that’s desirable.
- The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you’re subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a “cross-sibling post” designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.
- Both mod teams must agree to become siblings, so it can’t be forced on any community.
- Mods of either community can also decide to suppress the cross post if they feel it’s too spammy or not suitable for cross discussion.
- This allows you to easily learn about all related communities without abandoning your current one. This increases the network effects without needing to combine or destroy communities.
Of course, this could be more informal with just a norm to sticky a post at the top of every community to link to related communities. At least that way I know of the existence of other communities. I personally prefer the official designation so that various technologies can be implemented in the ways I mentioned.
Redundancy has been so important recently with the DDoS attacks, and even as that subsides it’s still definitely an important infrastructural perk that federation offers. It’d be a shame to lose that to centralization.
I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn’t address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.
I do! It’s why I thought it was important to highlight - I’m not too concerned about mod tyranny, per se, but I am concerned about servers going down.
This sounds good to me. I’m subscribed to c/rpgmemes which is run by the the old mod team of r/dndmemes but I’m also subscribed to c/dndmemes which is apparently run by people who wanted something like r/dndmemes. It’s a little redundant and confusing but I wouldn’t want either mod team to lose what they made
Yeah that’s a great example, especially because they have slightly different names. If you’re not in the know, you might never know.
Interesting idea, thanks for sharing!
You might want to cross-post this to !fediverse@lemmy.world to get that community’s feedback as well
Good idea. Will do.
The general idea is good, but 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:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecomment-1595273502
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.
This is a good idea too, but I do see them as different implementations with different advantages.
- “Following” is much simpler to implement, because it uses mostly existing systems. That’s a big bonus.
- “Following” is essentially automatic cross-posting, right? Presumably, everything from the followed community is cross-posted to the follower communities. I can’t think of when I would ever prefer that over getting selective cross-posts. Sometimes I don’t want to blast stuff out to all communities. Sometimes I want to post something in a local community, and other times I want to hear from all related (sibling) communities. Maybe it’s just too centralized for me.
- Siblings are related to each other but retain their unique identity. A followed person doesn’t need to know or care about the follower, and doesn’t have to allow any input from the follower. “Sibling” relations are bidirectional, while “follower” relations are unidirectional (though both sides can follow each other). I think all this has a big functional difference.
I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.
I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.
I think it’s a little like the competing Lemmy android/iOS apps. It’s totally fine for there to be multiple ways to do it, and some people can adopt multiple types, or just one, or none.
I think this has interesting but overall very positive implications for the local feed.
These are excellent suggestions, and I agree wholeheartedly. I think the main difficulty is in labeling “sibling communities” as such, because when you create a community, it’s not like you magically know which ones are supposed to be siblings to you.
What happens when you have two sibling communities that seem like they’re the same based on name and topic, but when it comes to moderation, they’re so different, you couldn’t really call them “siblings,” up to an including the mods from one not wanting to be associated with the other sibling community. Would there be an option to sever that relationship?
Good points. I’ll be more explicit about the details:
If, at the time of formation, you don’t know which communities would be siblings, then it’s the same as the current status quo, so I don’t see that as a comparative disadvantage. In any case, there’s no reason to rush into siblinghood. One hope would be that the existence of the term “sibling community” itself would encourage people to discuss possible connections, even when they’re not yet connected. I hope it brings like-minded groups together.
The sibling relation would need the consent of both mod teams, not just one side, so it can be unilaterally severed, but only jointly formed. No one would force lefty news and righty news to become siblings. But there are currently 5+ major “Technology” communities that are almost entirely overlapping. I hope siblings would allow them to overlap where appropriate but maintain their unique identities.
Yep … agree! And have basically thought similarly on my own too. Thanks for proposing and writing this up!
