I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:

  • If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
  • If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?

I was subscribed to android@lemmy.world, and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.

46 points

For me, I subscribe to all the multiple ones of the same topic and let time sort out their popularity.

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4 points

I think this is ultimately the intention, and it should all work itself out. If it makes sense to have everyone eventually migrate to one community, that will happen. If not, it won’t. This is one we can actually let the Invisible Hand take care of.

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3 points

That, and whether you like their home instances. If there’s a popular technology sub that isn’t on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org, I’d eventually switch to using that one exclusively

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23 points
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It’s not dealt with. You subscribe to one or many of them and then your home feed will show what it shows. People should not be cross posting unless you are actively involved in multiple similar communities and intend to participate in multiple identical discussions.

If you are just posting a link, provide no thoughts of your own and then do the same in multiple other places then your post is close to worthless and is more like an ad.

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11 points

I think this could be “solved” on client side. On Reddit you could (can? Idk) merge various subs to a single view, maybe clients like Memmy could do the same.

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5 points

Merging multiple communities like in a Reddit multisub would not solve the issue of duplicated posts in one’s feed.

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4 points

Honest question: How do you currently deal with multiple news outlets reporting on the same story?

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1 point

That’s precisely why Reddit and Lemmy exist, they are content aggregators and people sort out the best content and comments by voting. If you are trying to make the point that I should deal with multiple duplicates posts on Lemmy in the same way I deal with multiple news outlets, then your point is equivalent to say that Lemmy is useless.

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3 points

That looks like something that could be done on client as well, doesn’t it? I don’t know if posts have UUIDs or something but maybe it can be done.

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1 point

The problem is that posts may be exactly on the same trending topic, but not exactly the same. They could link to two different news sources for essentially the same news item. Or they could be a text or an image post about the same. Reddit mods would usually remove this kind of soft duplication within the same sub, and instead encourage to comment to one single post.

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2 points

Nothing solved that problem on Reddit either =]

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1 point

The way I use multis in Reddit is to create bigger topics, and I rarely see duplicated posts. For example, in Reddit I do not have a multi for subs /r/android1, /r/android2, /r/android3. However, I have a multi for mobile OSs, grouping /r/android and /r/iOS. Rarely do I see duplication.

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11 points
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Not just that, but if I have a question about, say, Linux scripts, then I have to search fifty fucking communities names c/Linux in fifty fucking instances to find a solution.

Just because an instance has the biggest community doesn’t mean it will have an answer. So I do have to look at fifty fucking instances.

I haven’t seen a single viable argument that justifies this irritating and inconvenient situation except i LiKe fEdErAtIoN.

And for the federation fetishists, yes you can have federation AND one single c/Linux across instances.

If you don’t want to read Linux tips from lemmy.naziLinuxUsers.com then just block that instance like you would block a nazi individual on reddit.

This problem is so ridiculously easy, but for some reason the mediocre status quo always has its ardent defenders.

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2 points

I think, I hope that search engines could solve this?

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2 points

Follow this train of thought… Would the web as a whole be better if there were one single website for Linux topics?

I haven’t seen a single viable argument that justifies this irritating and inconvenient situation

What is there to justify, and to whom? Nobody is forcing there to be multiple communities on the same topic, and if Linux users prefer a single community, nothing is stopping them from coalescing around the best one.

I get the discomfort some people might face dealing with seemingly duplicated communities, but the whole thing is such a non-issue, and is pretty much the way the democratic web has has been intended to work since forever.

Especially compared to the alternative… Some central authority who gets to shut down c/LinuxDevelopers because there is too much overlap with c/LinuxEnthusiasts? Why should there be one single Linux community and what do you propose to do if someone makes a their own slightly different flavor of Linux community?

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2 points

Well said, I agree with this too.

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10 points

Sign up for as many of those communities as you want. Unsubscribe from the ones you don’t like.

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