this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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The problem is that every "magazine" or "community" or whatever you want to call them (each one using a different name is also a bit of an issue) is part of their own decentralized network. Yes, you might be able to read them from other services, but it still causes a lot of fragmentation. For example when I look into something akin to a news sub for international news, I find [email protected] as well as [email protected]. Both basically do the same thing topically, but both have different submitted content, different users, and oddly in this case even the same owner.
This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.
I think this is a huge issue in the whole design philosophy of the fediverse that will hamper the growth of those services. Deciding where to make an account might be something a new user gets around to, but being then confronted by this is very quickly going to turn away the absolute majority of potential users. There needs to be at least a little bit centralization to form major default communities that at least start as a gathering hub for new people. If there's issues with them then people can still create alternatives if the user numbers are high enough, but in its current form I'd have to decide between several places that are essentially the same thing.
But is it really a Problem exclusive to the fediverse? there is several large news communities on reddit as well, and you have to pick or see duplicates. Also, this is only an issue in heavily aggregation-focused communities, not in those where content is generated (memes, hobby communities) as those do not have the issue of duplicates so you can just sub to all the ones you are interested in, even if several of them have the same subject.
Theres nothing stopping the client from offering a different or entirely customizable view to the content.
For example the client could allow user to place those communities under a common News category in their client. Then the client would combine all identical links in the category according to some criteria (e.g same link posted in the same day would count as identical) and either merge the comments or let the user pick which communitys comments to see, or preferably both. So comments section could have a buttons for "Comments at [email protected]", "Combine comments" etc.
I think it should be possible to build a client that hides most of the details about different instances and such so it would function almost the same as traditional RSS readers.