Seeing a big “politics” community in both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world just confuses me as to which I should be subscribing to and I don’t really want to subscribe to both.
Guess this is just a downside of federated instances? There’ll never just be one “/r/politics” on Lemmy?
Honestly, I can see why some people find it annoying but in my experience so far it’s been fine. Do a sweep on lemmyverse, sub to all the communities around a given topic, never really think about which one it actually came from when I see a post in my feed.
There are some quite niche topics that have been unnecessarily split, essentially just because people want to be in charge rather than joining forces, but that’s people for you and railing about it isn’t gonna get us anywhere. From an end-user pov, subscribing to multiple has been fine.
TMW you realize there’s no downside to joining multiple communities for the same topic, even if they have the same name.
Imo there is, but it’s solvable. Personally, I almost always browse specific communities/subs and almost never scroll through my home feed. So multiple communities is annoying because it means jumping between each one on the list. Could be solved though, by just implementing a Lemmy equivalent to multireddits.
It’s probably the number one feature request so if it doesn’t get put into the core Lemmy UI it’ll almost certainly be implemented by third party apps soon enough. Will definitely be useful, and fun for people like me who enjoy organising things into lists!
Yeah it’s natural to be a bit wary I think just because we’re not used to things working that way. Took me a little bit as well but I’ve been here for over a month now so settled into it nicely.
From a different end-user POV, seeing the same stuff repeated is not fun. I would prefer to see everything once instead of choosing between seeing almost everything twice(subscribed to both) or missing a little bit(subscribed to one, blocked the other).
Oh that’s interesting, I wonder why I’ve not been seeing repeated posts. Maybe a setting somewhere, or a version difference, or we use different interfaces or whatever. Yeah I can definitely see how that would be annoying!
The comments will be different between the two posts though
This is why the decentralized approach is great. If mods get their heads too power swollen, one can form their own community and even on their own server if they wish. The approach lessens the potential for abuse.
Totally agree - it’s a wonderful freedom, but it also means as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected and there isn’t a policy to transfer or reclaim the space if it is locked by the one person who owns it. Not a huge issue now, but come the point large companies are moving to the space it could well get quite messy!
as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected
What’s this about?
Seems like this is probably the answer. We don’t need to not looking for a 1 to 1 replacement for Reddit and the variation we see in communities could end up bringing some vibrancy and more differing opinions on things around here.
To be fair, this often happened on Reddit as well. I was subscribed to 6 virtual reality subs, and at least that many 3d printing.
One issue I’ve found with this model is that content is being cross posted pretty heavily, meaning I’ll see the same post by the same person 5 times in the matter of a few minutes.
I’m trying to keep in mind that it’s still early, and communities are still finding their way. The ones that form an identity will have a larger base, and will become the de facto place that posts are made.
Big oof on the reposts across communities. That’ll get old.
Yeah, I’m hoping that settle out too.
I don’t see this as a “bug” of Lemmy but a feature. What if mods get heavy handed because they feel ‘insulted’ and ban somebody simply out of spite. This gives the ability of somebody to form their own community of the same name on a different server without stifling speech. I sincerely hope that this does not get ‘fixed.’
It’s come in clutch a couple times as well when one instance is having federation issues, but I still get to see other content coming from a community on another one. There’s definitely downsides though, no argument there.
Exactly. And if one of them ends up sucking for any reason, you can drop it and be very glad that there were several. That’s very much the point.
I want to make sure people have a good experience here, but on this one, I really don’t get what people find so difficult about it…
This right here is the correct answer. Almost immediately you realize it doesn’t matter.
I strongly prefer it.
It’s a much more organic reflection of older systems. It used to be that there were local newspapers, national ones, and international ones. I want the same thing with my memes. I want a place I go to see what the hot movies and games across the world, and another where discussions are mostly people in my geography or who share a common set of tastes with me.
This idea that the internet should flatten the world into one monoculture has been, in my opinion, both naive and destructive to a lot of tastes that don’t align with the dominant tastemakers.
When I look at the many communities with the same names, I completely stops me from interacting with them. Most of the time I know they’re going to be copies of each other with a bunch of duplicate content reposted to infinity.
I think your example is interesting but i disagree with your assertion that it some how facilitates finding niche content.
For example it would be difficult to have to explicitly know that
obscure-instance.xyz/c/gameshosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands andprogramming.dev/c/gamesis actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nlandgame_designoffer a significantly better user experience. If we want to make the fediverse feel accessible to people, it has to be easy to find what you’re looking for.This whole thing feels like crypto where everyone has their own coin and they only kind of work together if you have some kind of exchange and some people accept Bitcoin and not Doge. It’s just too complicated for non technical people.
First, if it helps, redundant communities will solve themselves. We’re in a period where people are trying stuff out, but if one group is just a weaker duplicate of another, everyone will eventually just coalesce around the slightly better version.
As for the general complaint, I can see your rationale. But I think a better analogy instead of cryptocoins – which were all essentially useless ponzi schemes and ego projects – would be bars.
In theory, you don’t need two (or more!) sports bars on the same block. But there’s a reason they stay in business instead of one owner just expanding to serve twice as many customers. They have different vibes based on different people. One might dig soccer more, or have a better selection of craft brews. Even though they’re superficially similar, if you ask your friend, “Hey, do you want to go to X?” It’s not at all weird for them to say, “Eh… let’s to Y. if you want, we can stop by X later.”
You know what I mean?
The bar analogy is interesting but is missing the most important factor: All of the bars have the same name. The only difference is where they are located. Now I have to go to each one because I have no idea if they’re a soccer themed bar or a karaoke bar.
Even if the redundant communities somehow solve themselves (which I doubt), there will forever be an abandoned community polluting the search results because no one is going to delete it.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that !memes@slrpnk.net are gonna be lefty memes, and the memes at !memes@lemmy.ml will be generic, and so on.
There are some where it’s less distinct. Technology@lemmy.world and technlogy@beehaw.org are not so easily differentiated, but at the moment they have totally different content on their frontpages, so I have no complaints. Over time, I expect both to evolve, most likely in different ways.
I think the search problem will get resolved over time. Currently, search is very rudimentary, and barely useful for finding new communities. As it becomes better and cataloging communities it can also become better at downranking or excluding communities below a certain activity level.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that !memes@slrpnk.net are gonna be lefty memes
Lol. I can only assume it’s a massive joke and I’m just not in on it. !memes@slrpnk.net in no way means “lefty memes”. It only makes my point
Well… are you subscribed to !memes@slrpnk.net?
I don’t expect you to know that Gerry’s Bar and Grill is a gay bar or that Fanatics is a Packers bar by their name. You find out by going there.
A good thing to note is that both of those bars you mentioned have different names. That makes it easier to know which to go to, once I figure out which is which.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Reddit has multiple repeat communities too, they just have different names. Just to take one example, there’s /r/Canada, which got taken over by right wing assholes, /r/metacanada for those same right wing assholes to go full mask off, /r/onguardforthee for the people who didn’t want to put up with the right wing assholes… You get the picture.
The fact that there are multiple overlapping communities with similar purposes can be frustrating, but it also provides layers of redundancy, which is what the fediverse is all about. We’ve been learning a lot of object lessons recently about the problems of putting all your eggs in one basket.
There is currently a pending feature request to add a feature dubbed “multireddit” that communities can add themselves to and where the end user would only have to sub to one multireddit to have access to all the communities with the same on multiple servers. It seems to be opt-in for communities, though, which is good IMO.
This sounds like a great idea; all the benefits and there’s no obvious downside.
Exactly, can’t wait for this to be implemented!
Lol, thanks for sharing that. I came up with this concept myself when I thought about how you could fix this issue while also allowing servers to have duplicates of existing communities on other servers. I hope it will be implemented in the near feature.
Not really. I usually just check the subscriber count and pick the larger one. Unless if they’re about the same, then I’ll sub to both. Just means I’ll see more content. Might be a bit of overlap sometimes, but not always.
And if everyone does that, eventually there will be a main community that emerges and the other ones die.
Exactly why federated social medias instances aren’t necessarily a solution to centralized ones. Meta’s stuff his being preemptively blocked, but it’s bound to happen eventually.
I subscribe to both.
Why not subscribe to them all? Content will still appear on your home feed …
There were a bunch of subreddits I was subbed to on Reddit that were effectively the same thing, even if they had different names.
Once again, this is a feature, not a bug. Two different servers, two different communities, united by a common communication protocol. This is what separates Lemmy from other Reddit clones, and what made it thrive, unlike non-federated sites who are either splintered and languishing, or attracting an unsavory audience.
You’re right but the other side of that is various instances seem to feel the need to address it and ask not to create duplicates in guides, which makes it feel like maybe there is an argument that the feature is not always a benefit in some scenarios.
Yes, but isn’t it a bit unfair (not to mention hardly enforcable) to demand of new instances not to host certain communities because the already exist on instance xyz? Even on Reddit there were spin-off communities due to powertripping mods. So far the most likely solution seems to be topic clustering, which we can probably expect in some future update.
Yes very much so! I don’t think it should be enforceable at all, but it will be interesting to see how it changes and works out at the platform grows - and more so as large companies move in and the majority of users and content is on large instances which a lot of early adopters don’t want to be involved in.
I’m just curious, what is the harm in subscribing to both for a little bit? If you feel they post similar content you can always drop one of them. Or if one ends up ‘winning’ then the problem is solved.
The problem is that while subscribed you see the popular posts twice. All of them. Sometimes even literally one after the other in the feed lol
Right now we just choose between seeing almost everything twice (sub to both) or missing a little (sub to only one).
I don’t really see it being too different from reddit when subbed to to subreddits that have similar topics. I’d see the same topic multiple times.
The thing is, I went to reddit for the discussion and it would be different depending on which community the post was in and that can be the case here. A news sub in lemmy.world is going to have a more general view but a news sub in my own instance will have more LGBTQ people in the discussions.
I’d like to point out what just happened to !android@lemmy.world.
It was closed and migrated to another instance explicitly to keep things from being “spread out”.
It also happens that the instance it was moved to has extremely overbearing moderation that effectively prevents actual discussion. It’s so “curated” that everything is segregated into hyper specific feeds, everything except “official” news is removed, and no one is contributing because of the overbearing rules (no questions, no memes, no “rants” i.e. don’t make opinion posts).
It’s controlled by the “experienced” moderation team from /r/Android, that subreddit that would get like one or two posts a day that weren’t removed. It was strangled. We are supposed to defer to it this “experienced” team, hence why the lemmy.world instance has been locked. Now that instance sits pretty as having thousands of subscribers, and that will hurt the growth of smaller android groups because people gravitate towards the biggest ones and the second biggest one on lemmy.world is locked.
In essence, forced centralization. This is exactly what federation was supposed to prevent. Subverted in less than a two weeks since those communities formed.
I think in that case the “forced” centralisation is purely constructed. There are no mechanisms preventing somebody from creating an android community in their own instance and federating it with lemmy.world. Even if !android@lemmy.world is permanently locked, that fact isn’t really a barrier to entry for another android community to pop up, just that that community was able to establish a subscriber base over time but I don’t see why another android community couldn’t do the same given some time, especially if the available android communities at the moment are locked and restricted.
Imo admins should not allow the lockdown of a community on one instance in favor of the one on another. It’s fine if the original mod wants to switch, but then just get someone else to mod the community or close it down until someone decides to claim it again.
I don’t like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don’t know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it’s possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. “Cats” and it’s shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.
This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
The Linux community still does that tbh. Just because it works for some to scout the internet for jUsT tHrEe CoMmAnDs, doesn’t mean that it is easy or accessible to folks that just want a working system with working hardware acceleration (in the example of Fedora refusing to include codecs & a working MESA driver by default). Some people really enjoy making their and other’s lives harder 🙄
The lack of working hardware acceleration is mostly NVDIAs fault for not providing open sourcr drivers, and the community’s effort at reverse engineering the GPUs has been nothing less than Herculean. As for codecs, Fedora is derived from Red Hat, which is an enterprize distro and does not include (proprieatry) codecs to avoid licencing issues. Every problem you have listed is a result of corporate fuckery and not of Linux.
As for tech support, with Microsoft you can click the “diagnose” button, which does nothing, or spend a lovely time with an outsorced call Center which again, does not solve the problem.
I wasn’t handing out fault certificates, but merely pointing out that the community is so quick to defend things that are broken by design just for the sake of it.
And speaking of hardware acceleration, not even Intel cards could decode videos by default in Firefox (provided all the codecs were installed) up until version 115. You had to at least flip a flag in about:config and if you didn’t want to install the codecs from RPMFusion or any third-party non-oss repo, the Flatpak was the alternative, which would need to be run in native Wayland on Wayland. For that you need to pass a variable. How is a new user supposed to figure out all of these things when Firefox works just fine without of those hacks on other platforms? Yes, other platforms have their own issues, but at least they’ve got the basics right.
So many unnecessary hurdles that make no sense. And that’s just Fedora. Other distros have other kinds of fuckeries, like Snaps & incoherent GNOME on Ubuntu, no Secure Boot or Wayland on Pop!_OS, way too strict permissions & firewall on openSUSE, heavy screen tearing on Linux Mint with no Wayland on the roadmap which would fix that issue automatically. The list goes on and for each of those, you’ll find way too many people defending the broken design.
What I’m trying to say is that Linux adoption on the desktop will never move forward with widespread attitudes like that.
I really don’t understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that’s the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.
Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit’s r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don’t want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
I do not have a problem with the nerd/tech bubble being on Lemmy and I am not hostile towards them. I have a problem with them being the ONLY community able to participate because how complicated some aspects of this platform are. Why would Lemmy have to be ONLY “on the nerdy side”. Different people with different interests can coexist because you can create whatever community you want and they can also decide what content they want to see or not. Who are you talking about when you say “We”. It’s not like you or the tech community owns the feediverse. They might host most of the servers because guess what tech savvy people know how to do that but that’s just part of the problem.
I strongly disagree with the whole idea of a site going down in quality when everyone uses it. There will be more bad content but only because there will be immensely more content in general which is the major benefit that Reddit had. “Bots, shills, ads” are a side effect of a site being popular and you can’t have the one without the other. Reddit did not die a “slow death”. Before the whole API things millions of people browsed Reddit everyday and created interesting content. If you don’t like r/all the solution is obvious: Don’t go there. Only visit the parts of the site that you are interested in. That’s the whole concept of the home page. It has nothing to do with users refusing to learn but rather the site making it harder that it has to be.
The “complicated aspects” are the central idea of the platform as a whole. The concept of multiple servers united by a single protocol is not that hard, and any user not being able to grasp something as elementary as that would not make a good community member. Call me a snob, elitist, whatever. Lemmy is not a commercial project and has no YoY growth projections or sharholders demaning growth at all costs, and I would like it to remain so.
I’m curious, what’s your concern with subscribing to both? I had the same thought when I switched and then thought “is this just a knee jerk reaction? I can’t think of a decent reason why it’s that annoying when they both appear in my subs feed anyway”
I’m interested to hear why others might not like it as that might be what I’m thinking without realising.
The major concern is whether to cross-post so that members of only one community can see posts from the other, or to avoid cross posts so that people subscribed to both don’t see duplicates
As with almost every other question about the fediverse, we already discussed this to death decades ago and came up with the answers for email. Do what you’d do for two mailing lists on the same topic.
I have literally never in my life managed a mailing list. I have no idea what your answer even implies.
I wasn’t referring to managing. I was referring to posting, as a user. If you haven’t done that either, that doesn’t mean you can’t find all the discussions and decisions and rules and policies people came up with over the last four decades.
The upside of this is that if you don’t like how a particular community is being moderated, you can follow a different community about the same topic
To make matters worse, I’m on Beehaw, which has defederated from Lemmy.world, so I can’t see the politics community on there even if I wanted to.
It’s one thing having different instances, but quite another when users on one instance can’t see the communities of another.
On the other hand, having two different communities does mean that people in my situation could still participate on one of those.
I am new to this side of the fediverse. Why did Beehaw defederate?
Lemmy.world had open signups. There was a large influx of trolls that took advantage of the open signups to do so and then brigade Beehaw. The Beehaw admins like and respect the lemmy.world admin and anticipate defederation.
Refederation! They anticipate refederation! DAMMIT
Beehaw defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because both of those instances allow(ed?) registering without email verification/captcha. They said it is bringing bots and spams. Haven’t seen this issue personally. I recommend being a member of an instance that still federates with both lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works and Beehaw.
What’s more annoying to me is the few users spamming every instance non stop with “engagement” content. Like dang bro chill this isn’t about karma.
Some people seem to have gotten the idea that Lemmy needs to grow and to do that it needs all this drivel posted to it. Not sure why tho.
Possibly because if comms stay empty for a long time, people will search for content elsewhere, and lemmy get forgotten.
Remember that many people come from reddit, and are searching for a place where new content is easy to find.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
Once this lands it’ll be all the positives and none of the downsides, so, meh.
That will be as useless as multireddit The only option is to make the default all agglomeration of all communities of the same name on all instances. And then you block the ones you don’t like
It just feels like forums of old to me
