Asklemmy

Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it's on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.

I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can't create another r/historymemes.

Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.

I don’t see this as an issue. One of two things will happen:

1. Each community that has similar or same topics will begin to specialize: ie: the 25+ Apple subreddits. These communities will then become (if I have the nomenclature correct) “Comminities” within an “umbrella” topic.

2. If there are competing communities with a narrow topic, one will prove out, or if one goes off the rails, another will spin up to replace it. The Fediverse is, like a mesh, self healing.

The goal here is not to try and artificially constrain Lemmy to the limitations of the Reddit architecture, but to explore what is possible within a federation structured “information aggregator.”

Personally, my experiences on Lemmy have not differed much from Reddit, with the sole difference I did not need to purge a pre-defined Front Page. The only thing I really miss are some of the specific subreddits that have no analogs in the Lemmy Fediverse; and the ability to aggregate “like topics” as I did with multi-subreddits).

Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.

I don't really see the issue. I've subscribed to Technology maybe 4 times now? All that means is I get more tech in my feed. It doesn't really matter which specific community it is, does it? If there is an interesting tech-related story or news item I'm bound to get it on one of them, or all of them, and each post might have its own insightful comments on the subject. It's just more content and more opportunity for discussion. I think Lemmy will excel at bringing forward content in this way because you can sub to many different communities around a singular topic. You'll never be limited to just one place like a subreddit with mods who shape the content you get to see. If any one community started to be artificially controlled like this, there are 3 more who aren't.

I suspect it doesn't really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.

There were duplicate communities all over Reddit too, as long as he didn't have exactly the same name there were lots and lots of subs that had more or less the same content with overlaps of subscribers. Whenever those duplicates eventually one will pull ahead and most people will be active there.

(I'm new to this, so some things might be a bit off or explained weirdly.)

No, actually. Because different instances are able to federalize with each other, essentially creating a link which will show content freely between them such as communities, posts, and comments. If you set your feed view from local to all, you should then see stuff from federalized instances. Now sometimes an instance can refuse to federalize, such as if thd one you're using disallows NSFW content for example. There are also some times that I don't understand yet (prolly cuz I'm a scrub) that federalization isn't perfect, such as when you can access a community but not their posts, this I completely don't understand and might be a mistake of some sort. Lemmy is definitely a bit more complicated than Reddit, but I believe that this is more a problem with user expectations/unknowingness than it is a design problem.

I'd rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance

Yea, it's an endless debate lately.

Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it's possible the small clones will be left behind.

Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.

I've said this before elsewhere: I don’t dislike the idea that there could be multiple similar communities on different instances. That way if you have beef with one you could sign up to another; in a non-ideal world that strikes me as healthier than having one to rule them all and lots of people bitter about it. I think it’s best to leave it to sort itself out organically.

Embrace it, my homie. Think of lemmy use as more of a multireddit. Subscribe to things you prefer, then view it through that tab. So what if there's a dozen posts about something big? It's that way on reddit, facebook, and twitter for sure.

That's the benefit of federation. You get to see all of what's out there once you get used to the way it works. You'll have less of a stranglehold on information because nobody can bogart a single community name. My edc community might restrict politics, but the one on beehaw might not, and the one at feddit might encourage it directly.

It's much harder to accidentally fall into an echo chamber here with news. Not impossible! But harder. You'd have to choose to do so usually.

I know it seems weird, but trust the principle that underpins federation. It will settle out within a month or so of the migration. And it'll be fairly democratic, with communities becoming popular based on how they function rather than name camping.

This is a culture shock for us r/efugees, but it is going to be so much harder for our communities to be ripped apart because of it.

The most effective solution is to search for existing communities on federated instances before creating a new one on your instance. Then new communities are ideally only made if the existing community doesn't meet your particular need or specific interest (eg. UnitedKingdom vs UKCasual), or if your instance doesn't federate with the main community.

The same dispersion of userbase is present on reddit but the more popular urls/content will eventually become clear and less popular communities will either aggregate into the main one or become more niche (eg r/games vs r/gaming).

They'll start to have their own cultures. People will gravitate towards one they vibe with. Sub them all for now. Some will consolidate anyway.

No, actu

They aren't competing. As a user you should strive to follow ALL the comms with a similar topic, why limit yourself to the currently most popular one?

Yes, limit instances to X number of communities. Forces people to use the search function properly, stops the large instances having all the communities, also has the positive effect of the user base spreading out rather than congregating on one or two big communities.

Consensus and democracy. Have the top twenty instances vote on decisions. Have an equal amount of votes per instance, say five individuals from each instance all vote.

Instances will of course be responsible for the needs and wants of their users and the goal of appeasing them, so it all feeds into the same goal of improvement.

A constitution which is edited and followed, might be of use for reference.

I raised that concern too. As I understand it, there are a couple of different answers:

1. Some people seem to feel that one version of a community will eventually become the clear preferred choice, and users will migrate from other communities to that one. I think that will only happen when there is better implementation of the ability to find communities, particularly by activity. Right now that's not at all easy within Lemmy.

2. It can also be argued that smaller duplicate communities are more in keeping with the spirit of the Fediverse. That they will keep resource use divided among servers, thereby not burdening any one server with enormous amounts of traffic. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by that one.

I suggested some possible solutions, and I believe that the devs are at least aware of the issue. But I'm sure that they are beyond overloaded right now. My guess is that they are simply doing everything they can to keep Lemmy running under the impact of the Great Reddit Migration.

I wish there was a community for suggesting improvements and new features for Lemmy. Maybe there is one, and I just don't know about it?

I think it’s a valid question. I think there is value in allowing separate communities, but it makes discovery harder.

It would be nice to see a way of creating meta lists with one click signup functionality, so curated lists can be created.

And/or the ability for communities to be able to link perhaps? So they become functionally one community, but with the ability to split remaining in the individual admins control.

Duplication happens on Reddit too. It's not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.

Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.

I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).

The real question isn't whether it will be good/bad ... it's what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.

Users who are looking for larger communities can just dogpile whatever is popular and users who aren't will find something that fits them better just as they always have. I think some people do struggle with not having the massive fire hose they are used to though but everything starts somewhere; it never was going to be everything to everyone all at once. I'm personally finding not being lost in a sea of noise to be more engaging.