For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes. I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the pa...

I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

  • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    212·
    2 years ago

    I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.

    About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.

    Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that’s fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that’s okay.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      146·
      2 years ago

      I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:

      I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.

      • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        In this case, it’s the first, which is obvious based on the number of subscribers and active users. You don’t even need a third party tool, it’s literally in the sidebar

  • Landsharkgun@midwest.socialEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a ‘problem’? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.

    • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 years ago

      Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it?

      That would be pretty great, tbh. But what many demand is more like cross platform multi-player than this.

      If I play Overwatch, I want to be matched with other people playing Overwatch. I don’t care what network or platform they use to access the game.

  • ombremad@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    204·
    2 years ago

    It’s not a problem. It’s a great feature. Because there’s more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you’re free to do so. But I’m also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.

    It’s always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they’re brainless and they just think of Lemmy as “the new Reddit” (or Mastodon as “the new Twitter”).

      • ombremad@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        If they were identical they wouldn’t be separated. Everyone seems to fail to understand that the same « topic » doesn’t make automatically the same « community ». The goals and rules of instances are different.

        • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          2 years ago

          I 100% agree that what you suggest could be a valid usecase. However, from my subjective point of view, people are not using it that way. Let me present an example.

          There are 12 communities dedicated to Bitcoin in general. I can’t imagine 12 different points of view to discuss this topic from. Lemmy.ml somehow has 3, but 2 of them are completely empty.

          All of these are mere duplicates of each other. Let’s put the technical difficulties aside, and imagine we have a global namespace, and each instance just has it’s own mod team to which users would auto-subscribe (with an option to opt-out, or use a different list). Now we have more users seeing each other and being able to react to each other. Sure, that would put more strain on the individual mod teams, but, there could be a system in place to make it easier for them to cooperate. Two or more mod teams flagged a comment? Let’s auto-suggest it for the review to the rest.

          TLDR; More users, more mods, more fruitful discussion.

          Then, there are more niche communities. 1 dedicated just to the lightning network, 1 dedicated just to the markets, 1 probably dedicated to trolling and memes, 1 dedicated to bitcoin from the point of view of the united kingdom.

          All of these indicate their nature by the name.

          • ombremad@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            Goes to show that bitcoin bros like to spam around!

            Jokes aaide: I think you don’t quite get the point. The issue is not “are there enough mods?” but really “what moderation rules do you want to enforce?”. You can’t force collaboration on instances that have different views and rules on moderation because they will disagree on key elements. Some instances are very open to all kind of content, even offensive, and will enforce close-to-no moderation; others will have a very active moderation to protect their users against hate speech, for instance. You don’t solve anything by thinking those can work together. There are separate instances for a good reason, and it’s ought to stay like that.

            • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              12·
              2 years ago

              You can’t force collaboration

              You can. There’s always the lowest common denominator. If there’s a guy peddling viagra pills in the astronomy community, it’s clearly offtopic. Most mods would flag the post regardless of their political or ideological affiliation. That takes care of the obvious spam.

              • cooperation = advantage
              • noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage

              instances that have different views and rules on moderation

              And that’s ok. They will do as they always did. Hide posts, or users that violates their terms of service

              • cooperation = advantage
              • noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage
              • ombremad@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                “You can force cooperation”. Wow. A true fighter for free software, you are. Sure, let’s use that as a new catchphrase.

                (But if it was to be actually enforced on any actually decentralized network — a concept that you still have a hard time understanding, apparently — there would be forks up the ass from such an autoritative move. Just go on Reddit, that’s what you’re looking for.)

              • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                12·
                2 years ago

                Additionally, you could even automate certain decisions. Let’s say you are a pro-monarchy activist instance, and there is a post with title “Digest the aristocracy”, containing pictures of peasants playing football with the king’s head.

                You could’ve easily set the following rule: if mods from both hermajesty.co.uk and puppiesandkittens.org flags the post, AND freedomforpeasants.com does not, auto-flag the post here as well.

                In this scenario, even the “enemy” instance is making it easier for you to make the decision.

  • veee@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    I think the multi-Reddit approach as the default would work best. Users subscribe to a “central” Group or Topic and immediately pull content from every federated community that self-designates as such.

    One problem with this is if the community changes their mind and turns into something else. Either they check a box and designate under another Group or Topic, or get unsubscribed by users manually.

  • noride@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    I think the biggest issue for me with your proposal is any time a single pancake post is made, four communities now show recent activity and are likely to all show on everyone’s main feed.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Ideally only one post would be made, no crossposts. One pancake post would be on your feed, and that same post would be visible from other communities

      • noride@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Ahh, I think I got you. So, ideally, ‘followed’ content wouldn’t trigger recent activity within the ‘followers’ community? Is that the idea?

        • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Followed posts would just link to the original post and wouldn’t be a crosspost, yeah. So assuming a and b are following each other, a post from a would show up in b. If someone in b clicks on the post, they would just open the same post from a.

  • HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.

      • jelloeater@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Just waiting for thing to stabilize on 0.19.X for a week or two. If 0.19.3 proves stable, then we will move 🤞

    • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Honestly the Lemmy main devs just aren’t that great amd their hardline ideology pushes away plenty of potential help.

    • popcar2@programming.devOPEnglish
      56·
      2 years ago

      You didn’t read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I’m not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Once I thoroughly understand Lemmy’s functionality through the Sublinks Re-implementation (since Rust is like Greek to me but Java I know), I want to try and put in a community tag feature that would be able to assemble a feed of communities across the Fediverse dedicated to one topic.

    I may take me 6 months to a year if I commit to it, but I do think some community aggregation mechanism like that is sorely missing from Lemmy and could help distribute post load better while ensuring a userbase on non-general topics remain active.

      • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I’m not a software engineer by trade so no guarantees, but I’ve been wanting to improve it in some way. I still have yet to understand how Lemmy works, but from using Lemmy I’ve identified two big areas that could use improvement:

        Community Tags: Mods being able to tag communities on topics for better aggregation of related communities.

        Post Flairs: Users/Mods being able to assign a flair to a post for better client-side filtering of posts, from either a pre-defined list or freeform based on community preference.

        For ActivityPub compatibility purposes, either of these could potentially be analogous to Mastodon hashtags, but I still have yet to decide on how that would work especially without it becoming tumblr level.

  • spaduf@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I’m personally of the mind that we should be imagining a world where all 3 of these solutions are at play. 1 is absolutely the most important, and Admins should be taking an active role here where possible (particularly as it relates to dead community cleanup). I personally think they are the missing element needed to negotiate these sorts of consolidations. 2 and 3 on the other hand are pretty simple features and even if Lemmy never takes it on, I think it’s reasonable that any one of the new fediverse link aggregators could take this up. The only other thing I’ll say is multi-communities absolutely must be sharable. Ideally, it should even be possible to link multi-communities with the “!” syntax or similar.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I don’t think it’s a huge issue, there were often multiple communities for the same thing on reddit

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I personally don’t think this is a huge issue, but it is an issue. I usually pick the biggest community on a topic, or if there are multiple that are fairly active, subscribe to both/all. The only real complaint I have about it is that users will often make the same post to both communities, so I see duplicate posts on my timeline and the discussion is split in half.

    I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances, in a way that they would appear as a single community to users. I don’t know how that would be implemented though.

    • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances,

      If they are willing to cooperate that far, they could as well merge the communities

      • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        That’s true. I guess I like the idea of being able to distribute a community across servers, but it may be more trouble than it’s worth to implement.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    129·
    2 years ago

    I will never understand why people keep bringing this up as a problem, when the same thing happens on reddit, and no one ever cared.