Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
people having to subscribe to both to see the content
Not a problem. Just subscribe to both. It’s no big deal.
posters having to crosspost to both
Don’t do this! The above “issue” already solves this. If I want to see posts from both communities, I’ll subscribe to both communities. Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice, otherwise the audience they want to reach won’t see their content.
Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.
That’s exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
It’s your choice where to subscribe, and your choice which instance to use. Problem solved.
Sh.itjust.works, the 4th biggest instance, is defederated by beehaw, the 7th largest instance.
Should the 2357 monthly active users of Sh.itjust.works just leave to another instance to be able to access Beehaw communities?
It’s also your choice to subscribe to both communities. If you only subscribe to one, then the problem is solved.
Beehaw defederated with instances because they didn’t want to interact with its users. If the users of those instances migrate to another instance en masse, then Beehaw will defederate with that instance as well. Give up on interacting with Beehaw, because they don’t want the same things that people not registered on Beehaw want.
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There are a few, you can look them up on Lemmyverse.net
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And also, to give some weight to Beehaw’s position, there was a thread two days ago about refederating with SJW in !support@beehaw.org .
A few minutes after the discussion started a SJW account started to post pictures of feces.
I guess that boils down to the point I was asking about in the OP.
Can we/should we have a single community when people can post updates about tools, evolution, etc. of the Lemmy platform, or will people who want to bring content to that audience have to post to all the local !fediverse communities of the instances clusters?
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Besides Beehaw, have any other big instances defederated from lemmy.world? I don’t think defederation is a widespread issue.
I mean, beehaw is the 7th biggest.
LW also defederated from Hexbear, which is the 8th biggest.
Beehaw also defederated from SJW, which is the 4th biggest.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
The tensions between user bases probably justify the defederations, but it bring the issue I showed in the OP about having a community where all Lemmy users can discuss the platform together.
It would be nice if they developed some way to merge communities and splice crossposts together. This is a common issue with many communities.
I like having different communities on the same topic having completely different posts. Makes things feel less boring.
The issue is when it’s the exact same content, just duplicated, which is the case for the Fediverse ones
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You don’t have to have an account in an instance in order to subscribe to communities from that instance. You only need one account and you can subscribe to any community.
Unless it’s defederated
Wait, aren’t you able to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml via https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse@lemmy.ml ?
To be fair, to some of us this is a feature not a bug.
A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
There are smaller dedicated art focused instances popping up too. I’d expect that they’re going to have a better set of conversations around those subjects than the same threads on a general instance and I don’t want those mixed up.
If it’s a subject I really want to see a lot of discussion about, I’ll look at multiple threads… can this mean that some subjects won’t have as good of a conversation because people aren’t bouncing off of each other? Yeah, absolutely and that frankly SUCKS, but, as stated, it also means that some of the niche conversations have a chance to grow where they may have previously just been unseen due to how many people are talking.
To me, they’re on different instances for a reason, let it grow organically. The ones that stand out will wind up being the main ones people use.
As for amount of users. A decent amount of those are likely alts people created when instances were having problems or just to try out the different locations.
Or, people just didn’t like the Fediverse for all the reasons you stated, which is also possible, but I don’t necessarily think chasing numbers should be the end all goalA technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
Completely agree, and I mentioned that in the post as well.
The issue with the current two Fediverse communities on . world and .ml is that they are pretty much the same. There is no adding values in posting and discussing the same things twice.
Respectfully, who cares?
Hard truth… you’re not important. None of us are. No one cares enough about your opinions that they need you to “maximize your reach” by posting in multiple places. That is entirely a you problem, not an us problem.
No one is forcing you to post everything multiple times to multiple communities. You’re free to choose one and post to it. if it’s interesting enough, someone will likely share it to other communities. And if it isn’t interesting enough, they won’t. Simple as that.
that’s… how… it… works
Also, you talk as though browsing r/all on Reddit doesn’t also show multiple copies of the same post sent to multiple communities. Of course it does. Declaring something the “main” community isn’t going to change that anyway.
I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.
You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.
That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?
Thank you for your comment.
Lol what fucking idiot downvoted this
I stopped being upset with downvotes a while ago.
Lemmy is nicer than Reddit, but people are still going to downvote for no reason
Yeh I don’t care either, I just find it funny that most Lemmy users hold themselves out as some how ‘better’ than reddit, yet they engage in exactly the same dumb behaviors that make reddit a terrible place.
Definitely. I know heavy moderation is usually frowned upon, but I think Beehaw are doing something interesting with keeping the discussions “nice”
This is a really shitty way to express your disagreement.
And the fragmentation is definitely an issue worth discussing. It’s a lot more prominent here, in my opinion, than reddit, and that could discourage potential users.
