this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
246 points (98.4% liked)
Lemmy.World Announcements
29369 readers
8 users here now
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
Follow us for server news ๐
Outages ๐ฅ
https://status.lemmy.world
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Support e-mail
Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.
Report contact
- DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)
Donations ๐
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
Join the team
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're fundamentally not understanding the issue here. Mastodon isn't the same kind of content as lemmy, a link aggregator and forum. Microbloging doesn't have user curation, it has algorithmic curation. The only control you have over your feed on a site like mastodon, threads, or Twitter is by who you follow and they just throw all of those posts into a endless list filled with disorganized nonsense. You don't need to centralize communities there because there is no community to centralize. It's like millions of people are in a room and they're all shouting at once. Link agregators are the exact opposite of this. There is direct democratic curation superseded by moderation to keep communities focused and topical. You follow communities that will curate relevat content to their state topic and if those communities are not centralized you can't interact with them as effectively if they were. There is no reason for any individual game or media franchise to be divided across more than just 1 page unless the amount of topics and content they can produce necessitates dividing specific facets of that community to not cannibalize the limited space the sites format allows for. Some games force esports content into it's own subreddit and this severally hampers the visibility of that game on Reddit, or they divide out the meme posts because the sub is so filled with regular postings and discussion that they would get in the way and lose nothing by being segregated, unlike esports. Franchises like star wars don't have posts about Jedi survivor or the old republic on their main sub because those games generate their own content that most people who don't play those games do not care about. So yes, there are some reasons to divide communities, but there is not a strong reason to make more than 1 community for virtually anything on a site this small. There should only be 1 place to talk about Android here, for the time being, because there are simply not enough people to sustain more than that regardless of what your feeling on decentralizing communities are.
Decentralizing any community into small groups is exactly how you kill a community. People want to feel like they're apart of a large group and that they can interact with everyone who shares that interest. It helps that community grow and by pushing them apart you're essentially forcing them to choose what tribe they want to join and inviting tribalism when in reality they're all the exact same people who we are dividing because we lack the technical capabilities to unite them.
You can be a member of as many Android communities as you want. You don't have to pick just one. The community isn't divided. They can even share 90% of the same people.
There is no harm in giving each instance a shot at running the best Android community. If all but one sucks, then that one will naturally be the one people stay subscribed to.
why do these 2 communities exist if 90% of their users are exactly the same? this isn't a real scenario, this doesn't happen. everyone congregates to the biggest group.
I'm currently subscribed to gaming/games on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and kbin.social.
Each of those seems to be an active community.
If users from one choose to all congregate to one, that's fine. But if all three want to exist, that's great too.
Some people post, some people comment and some people lurk. Yes, 90% of posters across three communities probably doesn't make sense. But commenters? Lurkers? That's probably fine.
yeah, enjoy seeing 3 copies of the same trailers and articles in your feed LOL.
Lol, that's totally fine.
When a new game comes out I want to read the comments from "gaming", all versions of it, and I want to read the comments from "gamedevs" and I want to read the comments from "newgamelovers".
Maybe Lemmy can one day provide a "similar discussions" feature to highlight other communities.
You're using a link agregator. This is the opposite of what they are supposed to do.
I'm using Lemmy, it can do whatever it needs to do.
Also it's not just a link aggregator. It's comments too. "Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform."
Google News is a link aggregator. I have it, I use it sometimes, but it's just links. It's kinda boring but fine.
I'm not here for just the links. I'm here for the community. Each community. As large or as small as they want to be. I want the short answer. I want the long answer. I want the right answer. I want the wrong answer.
There will be no community if defederation and decentralized communities continue to hamper growth and diversity in content.
I understand your defederation concerns. That is really what is going to cause problems. Last I checked behaw.org defederated from lemmy.world, that's a genuine cause for concern. However I'm not worried about that long term.
I think Lemmy as a whole was just chilling and then a Reddit Exodus happened. If you owned an ice cream shop and suddenly school is cancelled you're going to freak out a bit.
I think as things settle we're all going to federate again. If we're all alone then all of your initial concerns are completely valid. That isn't to say that defederation is a bad thing. It makes sense sometimes. Even if different instances have different rules we have to share a general set of guidelines not to be a dick. Where that line is drawn is going to be complicated.
Luckily, most people are pretty cool. The loudest are usually assholes, but people as a whole are generally cool.
Decentralized however, that's ok. That's the crux of my argument. A hundred isolated communities isn't going to work (at the current scale) but a few here and there is going to be fine. Shit Reddit did this all the time. Going back to I think one of my first posts I outlined how one community grew from a dissatisfaction from the existing community. The only real difference is that instead of changing from "gaming" to "games" they now change from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]". It's a couple extra characters, it's not a big deal.