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.
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).
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.
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.’
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…
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/games hosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands and programming.dev/c/games is actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nl and game_design offer 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.
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.
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.
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.
