Redundant communities across instances (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by bfr0@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.

In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.

If that's the case, we'll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?

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[-] CannaVet@lemmy.world 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.^

If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may "win," you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.

You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.

[-] Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from aww@lemmy.ml and aww@lemmy.world and awwwwww@sh.itjustworks etc.

If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don't think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.

[-] Action_Bastid@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.

Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.

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[-] Yodadidas@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

🥈 take my free award. It's yours

[-] anonforker@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

and my axe

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[-] Provenscroll@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

"wholesome"

[-] VoidPoster@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

tl;dr I'll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers

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[-] dowhat@lemmy.film 4 points 1 year ago

Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I've mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.

[-] CannaVet@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

It's not pointless, it's just......not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that's the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that's perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don't have to pick one and forsake all others.

In regards to your other point, It's also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn't have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It's a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.

[-] spicytuna62@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don't have to pick one and forsake all others.

That's one of the cons of decentralization. You take the good and the bad.

One of the pros, on that exact same hand, is if you don't like a particular c/aww on a particular instance, you can create your own c/aww on a separate instance and give it the rules you'd like to see in a community where people post cute pictures.

I think the mistake a lot of other newbies are making is believing that this is going to be exactly like Reddit and nothing needs changing ever if we merely build it. No, it's like Reddit, but there are key differences. And you either live with those differences and stick it out until you figure out how it works, you go find another alternative, or you go back to Reddit.

No choice is wrong. Do what works for you.

Coming back to this to say one of the major pros of federation/decentralization is the redundancy will mean you can still get content on Lemmy, even if a particular server goes down. If Reddit goes down, you have to go outside and touch grass. If a Lemmy server goes down, the grass can remain untouched. You'll get content from other instances.

[-] Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

I think one point they're trying to make is that it would be nice to have "supercommunities", for example a kind of community that is the aggregated sum of all the individual communities it subscribes to, so for example super/aww that contains c/aww@1, c/aww@2, etc.

[-] CannaVet@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can't reply to the other comment,(my first block maybe?) but I wouldn't hold out hope that Reddit exiles will force the devs to say fuck it and make Lemmy a Reddit clone.

Those are in the works if you want to support those, that's not what Lemmy is for. Don't go to a decentralized platform and demand a central authority. 🤷

EDIT: Downvote harder Reddit stans lmao

[-] Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

It's not a reddit clone just because you can aggregate content, that seems like a rather narrow view. The instances could still host their own communities and the supercommunities could exist alongside one another and choose which communities would be part of them, it would just be a functionality that perhaps some users would find helpful. Wouldn't even have to be on Lemmy but for example on kbin or another alternative.

Why is that necessarily a bad thing? Wouldn't it increase the usefulness of federation since it distributes the data but allows for the communities to remain connected to each other? Couldn't you just not partake of that feature if you're opposed to it?

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[-] himbosis@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It'll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it'll be your link factory

[-] New_account@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.

It's similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.

[-] CountZero@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

This was my first thought. Reddit had both r/DnD and r/DungeonsAndDragons. It was fine

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

/r/me_irl and /r/meirl

/r/hiphopheads and /r/rap

This isn't new

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[-] SterlingVapor@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Nah, it's more than that. It's a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.

It doesn't start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you're suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs

Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.

At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place

There's also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you're going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don't want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they're going to ruin things

I mean, there's also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they're not cut off from the network, but the instances don't talk directly to each other anymore.

And while we're very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.

I'd like to see science and technology go in that direction because I'll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it's easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization

[-] dinosoup@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Doubly awesome - not only can you subscribe to both versions of said /c/aww on (most) any server, you will see the content inline with your normal feed so it's effectively just several versions of the same thing.

[-] SeaPancake@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

I like to think of it as a bunch of Discord servers (in a way). Each server is run by the owner / their moderation and can have different channels and rules in said server.

The idea of a "super community" doesnt seem like a bad one, but I'd rather have it be an aggregation of said communities then making it all one thing.

... Like maybe super list of c/aww communities that you can subscribe to at once.

[-] possibleHipster@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that "email" analogy I've been seeing

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[-] jon@lemmy.tf 21 points 1 year ago

I just sub to both if I run into a sublemmy collision where both are sizable. It is a little weird and I'd like to see some clean way to merge them in the future (i.e. with content migration and redirects), but for now it is what it is.

[-] rockyTron@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago

Now what we need are concatenated multi-communities where I can have a linkable collection of each of these overlapping subscriptions at multiple federated instances. In RES they were "multi-reddits" and they were my primary way of compartmentalizing and consuming content.

[-] heyztb@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I suggested this in a different thread, but I think it would be cool to be able to create and share feeds surrounding a topic. All the posts from the communities that are included in the feed show up there, and you can share that feed with other people so they don't need to do all the hard work of discovery themselves.

Surely the devs are already looking at something like this.

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[-] bill_1992@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

I think two communities can live side-by-side and even develop their own culture. With federation, someone subscribed to both essentially has no downside right? I think forcing merges would cause some issues (like, who moderates?).

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[-] fcuks@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

reddit also had that a bunch of places, for example /r/gaming /r/games /r/truegaming.

[-] Hupf@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

I hear there's also eight or nine cat related subs

[-] Action_Bastid@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'd say it's a problem that will solve itself. Beehaw's gaming communities seem to be doing better than Lemmy's, and I'd highly encourage giving them a look. Part of the greatness of the federation system is that we don't have to host EVERYTHING locally (and it's probably not desirable to).

After all, if Lemmy does some stuff really well, and Beehaw does some stuff really well, both of us can thrive together without both sides having to eat hosting costs for double hosting all the content.

[-] AnotherPerson@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Beehaw seems to be coming in strong. I almost made an account on their server but for some reason they don't allow downvotes which I feel could be an issue in the future.

[-] Action_Bastid@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It might be, but a number of Reddit communities did that via CSS as well and forums before that didn't even have voting systems at all.

Time will tell. Part of the excitement of all this is going to be watching how everything develops

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[-] ChaosAD@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

beehaw blocks many other instances though. I don't feel like supporting them to grow. Too centralized.

[-] EfreetSK@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I'm on Fediverse for few years and reading all the replies here I find it ... sad? Funny? I really don't know what to think of this. It looks like for many people the biggest disadvantage of federation is federation itself ... It feels like people want the centralization and don't want to have options (or rather think about the options)

Or is it an age thing? I'm kind of used to lurk the internet and find what I want. But I can imagine that people raised on f.e. Netflix, Amazon where it's like "BAM! Here you have everything" aren't used to this

[-] 24Vindustrialdildo@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

I work in a space adjacent to change management (ERP implementation) and honestly, be happy and kind. These questions are the absolute default ones of humans attempting to puzzle out a paradigm shift. And the fact they're here and they're feeling loved enough to actually ask for help with their new mental model of it is about eight degrees better than it could have been.

So my answer is: it's just like r/games, r/gaming, r/videogames, r/patientgamers. They are all the same subject matter with overlapping content and userbases, with potentially wildly different moderation biases and groupthinks. And that was all on one centralised Reddit! You subbed to some, or all of them, as you saw fit, you maybe even managed a multireddit to group them! It's just the same here except they're on different instances and soon, enhancements to Lemmy pending, will be just as seamless to manage.

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[-] StringTheory@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I keep having this image of the owner of a small cottage who has gradually been making his cottage lovely, repairing bits, adding cozy furniture, hanging out with his friends playing his ukulele on the porch.

The huge apartment building down the road burns down, and he invites the huge crowd of refugees into his cottage for shelter. They immediately start complaining that his cottage is too small, it doesn’t have an elevator, how come there’s no exercise room, ewww there’s cat hair on this rocking chair, that color of paint sucks, how could you be so stupid as to have a slow cooker in your kitchen, we need to add on so tell your friends to get off the porch so we can turn it into a sexy new studio…..

[-] rockyTron@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

And then they build their own cottages, and mcmansions, and apartment blocks, along with all the noise and detritus... and now your cozy little cottage is just a house in bustling village

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[-] matt@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I think it's just as simple as:

Most people want the decentralisation perk of not having a single profit driven company controlling everything, and that is where it ends.

Other than that, people would rather just have everything in one place where everyone is, but of course that is antithesis to the whole decentralised model.

People have gotten used to the convenience and ease of the silos, and people don't want that taken away.

[-] steve@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

The lemmy ui could add a way to group communities at the user level. Something like multi reddits.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

I think it will for the most part sort itself out. I do see this issue has been brought up before but didn't get much traction.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I think that something like being able to group communities by topics would help a lot. You could then just sub to all communities that are tagged with the topic, then the fragmentation really doesn't matter nearly as much. Posts would get spread out across communities and instances (which I think is a good thing) but would still have a decent amount of visibility.

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[-] BlinkerFluid@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

I just collect them like candy. Oh, another tech board? Added.

I don't particularly care which community a post comes from. Subbing for me is so I am made aware of their posts. I honestly don't care where it was posted.

[-] briongloid@fedia.io 3 points 1 year ago

We just need a more user-friendly way for all the !gaming instances to be grouped together, with users having the control of adding/removing what makes up their personal !gaming on their chosen fediverse instance.

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