this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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id argue none of those are fun topics you can joke about but "memes as a form of outrage" (aside from, like, two) which is already a problem (see all the political memes on any of the meme communities for countless examples) we do not need to encourage imo
Let's give it a try
Variation
spoiler
Agreed
There are two main issues with centralization on LW:
A detailed thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee that discusses the issue: https://lemmy.world/post/14728407
Agreed, and as I always say, I think they do a quite good job overall. At the same time, it would be better if communities could move away from LW as well, for reasons stated above
The issue is that new joiners are probably going to move to LW, as most of the users and communities are there, and they might not completely get how federation works. So then LW would become even more centralized, in a chicken and egg way.
That's why I'm advocating for moving communities now, then the whole thing is more balanced.
That would be ideal, but Lemmy development usually takes time, and we should always be ready to have an influx of new users. Solving the issue ourselves has a higher and faster change of success than wait for the devs to update it, release it and then wait for all instances to upgrade.
Talking about upgrades, LW plans to skip 0.19.5 as their upgrades are always so impactful due to their size and the centralization of communities there, preventing a third of the Lemmy users to use new features.
Communities can already be migrated at the moment. I moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, left a pinned post on the old one, locked it, and everyone moved to the new one smoothly (we even have more activity now than back then).
I sometimes feel like some people in the LW staff are reluctant to close some of their communities, even if unmanaged, and that prevents communities on other instances from really getting popular.
To me the biggest factor is some of the LW staff "name squatting" a topic rather than agreeing to redirect to active communities on the same topic.
Most of the users are unaware of most of the features. I met a year-long user the other day who had no idea they could import / export their settings. Also, that release has been out for 2 months and a half, 54% of the instances use it (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/versions ), including 7 other instances of the top 10 (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy )
No, to be honest having a look at the code I'm not sure we would ever get such a feature. Mastodon does not allow this kind of imports, and they are much more stable and mature than Lemmy. Maybe in 5, 10 years? So in the meantime, we can do it ourselves the way I described above.
That's interesting you mention this, because
I am never in favor of deleting any community, that's detrimental to the platform.
To add to that topic, I try to get people on Reddit to switch to Lemmy a lot (they are probably the biggest potential users we can get), and the first question they ask is "why are those communities empty? It looks like a ghost town".
Locking them down, and redirecting to active communities makes Lemmy look more appealing as a whole.
Power tripping definitely happens, for a lot of mod / admins. It's sad, but sometimes it's the main driver to a healthier community / instance, as the meme stated above.
Damn, that's a lot of text 😄
What does "other instances" mean in a federated context? I can use my LW alt, use it to post everywhere for a few weeks, am I now a local user?
I have another example for this !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz
From time to time, some LW users go to the LW to post. Then all of a sudden, the paradox of choice is there again, and it's less clear for everyone as well.
All of this while 2 of the 3 mods haven't been active for months, and the last one just popped back from a 2 months hiatus, preventing me from requesting the community.
That's what frustrating with the whole situation. Sometimes you also encounter name sitters such as https://lemmy.world/u/WandererLagomorph770
Have a look at that list of communities, and tell me this is not a name squatter.
There are a lot of abandoned instances. Actually, it's the other way around. Having a look at the stats, most of the populated instances are using 0.19.5 except LW, so it's 18k out of the around 50k monthly users which are held back.
To be honest, I even forgot the picture thing was introduced then.
It's up to debate, but to me if the mod isn't active for the community (e.g. posting regularly), they should ask for someone else to take up that role. And if nobody wants the role, and there is another active community to redirect too, it could be nice to lock the inactive community down and redirect to the active one.
I mod a few inactive communities (such as !harrypotter@literature.cafe ). If someone came to me and said "hey, we've been trying to get our own HP community active, you already have some people on yours, would you mind locking yours down as you don't seem to actively mod it, and redirect to ours?" I would definitely do it.
They are not, but at the same time the LW rules still allow them to namesquat that community.
For the instance, as long as you take the big ones (LW, lemm.ee, SJW, dbzer0, lemmy.ca, etc.), your experience will indeed be the same. To know which community to post too, this is a different story, and I've seen a lot of people telling me "I stay on Reddit because when I when to post about a topic, there's a clear community where to. On Lemmy, there are two or three active communities competing for the same topic, and it's just confusing". Of course we should keep different communities for different folks (no one would consider merging lemmy.ml communities with LW's), but we can also reduce the confusion for a few core topics that can help new joiners to get settled
They are not, but as I said earlier, LW is so large than they have to be extra cautious with their updates. If they would be 20% of the total Lemmy population, and 30 of the top 100 communities compared to now, they would probably be more at ease with "me can mess up a bit, it's okay". Having them as a cornerstone of the whole platform puts them constantly under the spotlight.
Found on !memes@lemmy.ml
Let's try this here before it gets its own post somewhere.
That is, I have a growing suspicion that even here in a community that specialises in the Fediverse, hardly anyone can relate to it, and out in the meme communities, nobody will even understand it.
Ah, that's Mastodon's main dev, right?
Yup.