this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.

What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?

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[–] WhoRoger 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Sub to all of them and wait for all but one to die out.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It would be nice if there were an app or plugin that would aggregate them into one heading or folder. So that on the user end all of the Gaming@ Lemmy.lm Gaming@ Beehaw, etc etc just show up under #Gaming on the users end. It would also improve the longevity of the smaller ones since we can already post across instances.

That said I'm an idiot and not even remotely sure how that would get set up :).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If there is not already a way to combine communities into a single feed, surely there will be soon.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like the challenge with that is that is going to be moderation. (well, the challenge is always with moderation)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I mean every community moderates itself, if you don't like what one of them does, you cut it out of your feed.

It sounds exciting, imagine if mods would have to compete for shares of a topic instead of a group gatekeeping a big community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There is a multi-reddit issue open on github. As soon as someone actually codes it, it'll be there.

I'm trying to learn Rust atm to contribute, but very likely someone will code that up before I'm ready to actually submit pull requests and not be laughed out of the room.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just sub to the most popular one assuming it'll be the one to win out.

[–] robonps 1 points 1 year ago

Yep. It was the same issue as multiple similar subreddits on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is pretty much what I expect to happen

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Start beef. Survival of the fittest.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Fuck beehaw. All my homies hate beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is this just going along with the other comment, or did beehaw actually do something hate-worthy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Beehaw is fine, he's just "starting beef"

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

I join the biggest one

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because communities on Lemmy are still in their infancy I join all of them (at least the larger ones) and will wait to see which of them gather traction.

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[–] lynny 15 points 1 year ago

Same thing I did on reddit, use the more popular one.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Subbing to all of them, contributing where I can, and seeing what happens :)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I like the idea of different communities. A single giant "community" like reddit feels too big. Effectively no one can participate and the only content you see is the least common denominator. Ideally we'll continue to see at least a few popular instances and not just conglomerate back to one giant instance. I think what needs to happen though is a better integration of local vs federal instances. There should be a toggle within a certain community page to see versions from other instances. Or a way to merge multiple community posts together.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like the idea of different communities. A single giant β€œcommunity” like reddit feels too big

This is a good point. Some users prefer being in a community with a lower number of subscribers. Not everyone wants to post in a community with a million users so having big and small communities for the same thing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It gives people the choice to decide which one they want to participate in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right, I don't know if anyone would want to post in a super giant community like reddit. Your post just gets lost in the void, content gets completely dumbed dumb, and no one knows anyone because there is too many users. This was a huge of appeal of the old time forums which got killed with reddit. I think the internet is going to fundamentally change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think it depends on the community. For entertainment stuff like videos, anime, memes, etc. I'd prefer a bunch of smaller ones. But hobby type communities, where you aren't only looking at newest posts, I'd rather one big organized community.

For instance, if I want to buy some new headphones then is would be a pain to have to look through 6 different instances for a stickied reccomendation thread.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is surely going to be a bigger time sink and possibly more effective skinner box if I have to click back and forth between half a dozen different communities to follow different threads on stuff like breaking news or game/event threads.

I think this will ultimately be polarizing, but I also kind of think it will have a lot of really interesting side effects as it scales.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well you don't HAVE to go on every community to see what every single community says about something though. You can just have the couple communities you follow and check those. Likely there will just be a couple of big communities for each topic, not dozens. What might happen even is that you have certain instances specializing in certain topics. You might have left wing and right political instances for example, so you'd just check the 1-2 instances you follow.

Each instance would effectively become analogous to the old time forums.

Like I said though, there is also the possibility of merging content from different instances into a single page.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's actually a great point. Haven't really done much posting on reddit for the past couple of years but really enjoy the more intimate feel of lemmy atm. We'll see how it all pans out but I yearn for the old phpbb days of the internet :D

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I just keep an eye on all of them.
Eventually this whole thing will sort itself out and the snowball effect will see some communities get bigger while others fall to the wayside. It's a natural progression.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m hoping this gets addressed with a super-community / β€œmulti Reddit” type feature eventually. But that wouldn’t really address how posting works. You would still need to drop it into a single community. But maybe it could encourage spreading content around similar communities.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can add your post to the tagged Lemmy communities by tagging them like so: @!community@lemmyinstance.

[email protected]

Shout-out to @[email protected] for posting this tip.

*Edit: don't forget to start it with the ! And type slowly. A drop-down list will appear as you type.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That potentially makes things very simple to kind of 'instantly cross-post' w/ a multi-reddit type setup

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There's 2 issues for this on the codebase so it will probably get solved. I think the devs are just trying to fix some database issues first though.

[–] Azabs 5 points 1 year ago

Join all of them of course.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I sub to them all, and then order the communities to fight each other. The last community standing is the winner. Surprisingly, none of this has ever happened yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I just subscribe to all of them. And I feel it's worth pointing out that this was a thing on Reddit too. I often saw the same post on two or three different subreddits I was subscribed to. Eg. I was subscribed to both CanadaPolitics and Ontario, so Ontario politics stuff often appeared twice. Three times if it was local Ottawa news that made provincial and national headlines.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I just subscribe to both of them, the more mindless scroll content, the better >:D

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I choose the one with the most subs. Multiple 'new' posts of the same thing will irk me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Look at their activity, if cannot determin which is the most likely to survive, I sub them all and wait.

[–] TheBananaKing 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

They should treat it like hashtags on mastodon.

Anyone can post to a #communityname. Local mods are responsible for content from their instance. If an instance doesn't weed out shit posts, other instances can stop importing its content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think that should work like that.

Take, for example, [email protected] and [email protected]. They have the same name, yet they have different goals. One is a generic world news type community, while the other is specialized to the instance.

Treating everything as the same overarching community would be really limiting. Sure, the split can be a problem if you're not used to it, but like how you can have multiple similar subreddits (e.g, /r/portugal, /r/portugal2, /r/portugueses, etc) with varying levels of popularity and affluence, you should be able to have multiple Lemmy communities, but since we're federated, we don't need to pick different IDs, we can just be on a different instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think defederating is easier said than done, and besides, what if one community is very well behaved and helpful and another is toxic and awful? You throw out the good with the bad in that case.

I think instead the user should be able to choose to combine similar communities, similar to the 'multireddit' concept. Then they can get lemmy.ml gaming and beehaw gaming in the same feed.

To help with discovery, a curated list could be created, and perhaps communities from that list could be suggested as time goes on. This does require some kind of centralisation but it would be down to the instance owner to decide to subscribe to it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Eventually one will become the biggest/most successful. Give it a bit of time.

Same thing that made, for example, /r/technology bigger than /r/tech on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm joining all of them for now. I figure eventually I'll have a favourite for each topic and then just keep that one, or maybe I keep them all except the one filled with trolls.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Offtopic, but how do you search for communities on lemmy? I am facing a bit of trouble getting started. Any help would be really appreciated

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm using the Jerboa app on my Android device and the second tab from the left has a search feature. On desktop, I think this is your best bet: https://browse.feddit.de/

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