this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.
So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That's very limiting.
Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I wrote a response to the first part yesterday.
Absolutely agree that large user bases have distinct advantages. It's gonna take a bit to get there though.
I think the fracturing of communities will sort itself out with time.
Even within reddit there has always been multiple communities per niche before one floats to the top.
I think the main issue with that is reducing the barrier between instances so that its easier for people to find the large communities
I agree with this. I'm not worried about that fracturing because it's also pretty common on reddit. IE: the r/nba sub alone has more than a couple of spin-off subs.
The difference is that you can just sub to them all easily and get all their content. It's much harder on the Fediverse because you need to go to a lot more effort to do so and there is a lot of junk communities with few posts out there. There are also complete nutjobs running some of them that you ordinarily wouldn't want to interact with either.
Now if there was a clean, easy and fast way to sift though all the crud across multiple servers at once that would make a huge difference.
I don't see a lot of difference in terms of effort in searching for communities between here and reddit. I'm on Jerboa and I tried searching "technology" and "science." The communities with the same and similar names popped up. That's how I did it when I first got here and that's how I do it in reddit. If I wanted to, say, join an anime sub all I have to do is search (for example) anime then tap the sub I want to join if there is more than one. There's a huge subscribe button there (I just tried it since I'm not subbed to that yet).
I have't come across crazy mods/admins yet so I can't comment on that. Which subs have them?
Edit: I think the main problem is with the browse.feddit.de and that's what you're referring to? Yeah, that can be a challenge (I don't think Jerboa supports it yet), but it's easy when you've done a couple.
Iβm new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one βthis is my feedβ so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you donβt lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a "magazine" on here it'd be really nice to collate a number of magazines I'm interested in into a "rack" similar to a multireddit.
Yes, for browsing and up/downvoting it could be totally transparent. When you want to make your own thread it could just have you select the specific magazine/commumity from a drop down.
edit: even commenting on existing threads would be totally seamless.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a "Book" or "Literature" tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
@hllywluis @BobQuasit @MentallyExhausted
I'm pretty sure there has been mention, either by the Lemmy devs on a post here or on the projects GitHub repo, about adding a feature analogous to the multireddit feature on that site. It's definitely a feature I would appreciate, and would go hand in hand with what you're describing as well.
Perhaps there could be a way that the moderator of mutiple 'Books' magazines could agree to mutually federate (assuming their instances are federated) in some way.
I guess I'm too dumb to still understand how the communities work. I am using kbin, and it seems like magazines are the equivalent of a sub-reddit? I subscribed to a couple, but I guess there are multiple of the same magazines which are about the same thing?
You pretty much have it. Magazines on kbin and communities on Lemmy (same thing, as I understand it) are subreddits to all intents and purposes. But there are multiple ones, or similar ones, broken out all across the fediverse (which for some reason Android voice dictation wants to spell "fetaverse"; that definitely has comical possibilities!).
If you're subscribed to one of those communities, you're not connected to any of the others. So the total number of people who are interested in that topic are all split out from each other across the fediverse into relatively small groups.
You could search out the equivalent groups across the Fediverse and subscribe to each of them. But those communities and users would still be all split apart from each other. Readers of books on lemmy.ml won't see or be able to respond to posts on books on Beehaw.org unless they all go and subscribe separately to that beehaw community. So basically the whole community of interest is fractured.
Now, perhaps one of those communities will come to dominate all the others just in terms of popularity, and everyone will end up joining that one. It's possible. But I'm not sure that most instances could handle that kind of traffic. The ideal solution would be some way to merge communities of similar interest, or link them, or something. But these are early days yet, so maybe that's something that will be accomplished later.
We're not going to see massive communities like there were on Reddit for a long time, if ever. There are advantages to that, but also some big disadvantages.
There are many instances ("servers") of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of "magazines" and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.
Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance "foo." Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance "bar" and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won't see it. The community is effectively split β often into more than two parts.
This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit's. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn't intuitive to newcomers.