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?

25 points

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.

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7 points

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).

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1 point

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.

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27 points
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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.

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6 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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Its kind of annoying seeing amazon and walmart on the same internet as well.

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25 points
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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.

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10 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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23 points

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.

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4 points

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 🙄

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1 point

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.

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125 points

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.

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30 points

TMW you realize there’s no downside to joining multiple communities for the same topic, even if they have the same name.

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8 points

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.

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29 points

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.

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12 points

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!

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18 points

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.

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6 points

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!

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0 points

as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected

What’s this about?

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22 points

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).

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1 point

The comments will be different between the two posts though

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1 point

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!

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3 points

This right here is the correct answer. Almost immediately you realize it doesn’t matter.

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8 points

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.

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4 points

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.’

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3 points

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.

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8 points

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.

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7 points

Big oof on the reposts across communities. That’ll get old.

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7 points
*

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…

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