this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.

A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?

B: I think this is the best solution, could a 'super community' method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For this to happen every single instance will have to fetch every community from every instance to aggregate posts and make sure new similar community is added which isn't feasible (I think).

Give it some time, and I think organically 1-2 most popular communities will emerge for each specific topic and people will then just subscribe to those ones.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Personally I feel the entire point is it should be done like that. Like it was in the 90s. Every little cats community can be out there and independent from each other; communities, identities and administration can remain separate. For discoverability, rather than make it part of the platform which would eventually induce dark incentives towards the kind of consolidation that happened with Reddit in the first place, well, why not also do it like back in the 90s? There used to be the webdirectories, as well as the webrings (in Yahoo, Geocities, etc) that served as an independent discovery system.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I kind of like the idea for B. I'm not sure how to determine who the authoritarian figure would be to decide which 'cats' get to be in 'super cats'. Could some be excluded from the super group if they're pro-dogs/racist/etc? Is that against the whole idea?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There absolutely needs to be a good way of finding communities here on lemmy, that would probably mitigate the problem a bit. I also like your sticky solution linking to similar communities, but it would be great if this happened automatically (or semiautomatically) when creating communities. As in: oh you are trying to create a "technology" community on your instance? Did you have a look at these ones with the same name on federated instances?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you aware of the community browser? Works great for finding communities across all instances

https://browse.feddit.de/

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It would be great if this could be accesssed easily from within the fediverse

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

i am actually aware of it. but i think it (or something similar) or something similar should be included in the 'new community' dialogue, to curb the amount of new, duplicate, communities being created..,..

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The thing is, each Lemmy instance is independent of each other, and new instances do not start off knowing that any others exist. Similarly, existing instances do not know that new ones exist. There's no central registry that everything passes through, and it wouldn't be, decentralized if there was.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For what its worth I just spend this morning scraping a list of communities from the dozen largest Lemmy instances. ANd last night for no good reason other than it existed in Reddit, I created [email protected]

Today's Lemmyverse Community Listing: https://lemmy.ca/post/612259

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love the idea. The drive.google.com is requesting permission, can you make it more open? Or paste it in a pastebin?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Whups. try now.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Any update on this?

I couldn't find any comment from the devs. Was there one?


There is an extra problem, not mentioned here. When there are subs with the same name, it is actually impossible to know of choose which sub I am posting to. Like here.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Two perspectives, Viewer and Poster. Posters create new threads, Viewers view and possibly comment.

Two access methods, direct and indirect. Direct means entering a specific community. Indirect means browsing content which is aggregated in your stream from all your subscriptions.

Viewer, indirect: It does not matter wether your cat content comes from 1 or 100 individual sources *, it gets aggregated anyways. **Super communities can not help with this use case.

Viewer, direct: If a Viewer visits communities directly then yes, fragmentation is an issue. Super communities can help with this use case.

Poster, direct: The only access method for Posters, since they cannot create content indirectly but have to decide where to create it, and wether only in one, or in multiple communities **. Posters have to make that decision regardless wether the communities are grouped to a super community or not. **Super communities can not help with this use case.

In conclusion, community grouping can improve the experience for direct Viewers, but has no effect on indirect Viewers or Posters. We can also differentiate between server-side grouping (which seems to be the proposal) and user-side grouping (aking to multi-subreddits: users compile arbitrary lists of subscriptions into one, new feed).


*) Depends on how exactly aggregation is implemented. It could be that posts in small communities with less absolute traction have a lesser chance to be streamed. Or it could be the relative size of the community is accounted for. How to know?

**) Multiposts in similar communities can create another, related issue for Viewers indirectly browsing content, as they now see duplicates in their stream.

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