Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.
There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.
A cool feature would be an opt in community federation. So two aligned communities on different instances can “friend” each other and will be synonymous. If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.
This would require content addressing to be robust. It’s what bluesky’s atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol
A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.
Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
No, this would be just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, a single monolithic social media website. That one instance would have higher running costs, and also greater power and influence and would be able to shape the narrative on controversial issues.
As as I said just below, I didn’t mean to have every community on that instance.
Just to have a single Fediverse community on one instance that could be used by everyone. You wouldn’t have user registration on that instance, and as such it would not have to replicate any of the other communities except the local !fediverse one.
People shut down / buy out that server? The community falls back on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
It’s kind of similar to what people are trying to achieve with lemmy.film: a single instance on one topic, federated with as much instances as possible. To get discussions in one active place rather than scattered across dozens of communities.
Spreading communities across as many instances as possible is no doubt a good thing, but it doesn’t really solve the forking problem, and “the community can fall back on x or y to figure out what to do” demonstrates that pretty well - if a third instance is set up to replace those two communities, then that third instance breaks down, which of the two (or, let’s be honest, more than two) different instances/communities are used as the fall back, and how is that communicated to users who likely don’t even understand federation?
For federated communities to win out over monolithic platforms, they really need to reduce the power held over communities by the instance administrators - seamless migration of communities and user profiles between instances is a major gap in Lemmy - and make it almost completely transparent to the user. The user shouldn’t really at any point see much of a difference between Lemmy and Reddit, for example.
Very good point
This 100% goes against the purpose of federation. Buy one instance, own the feddiverse.
I didn’t mean to have every community on that instance.
Just to have a single Fediverse community on one instance that could be used by everyone.
People shut down / buy out that server? The community falls back on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
Hey, I’m the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren’t many instances yet. It’s become a very active community, and I’m constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it’s an interesting idea.
I don’t really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a “Neutral Zone” between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don’t really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there’s always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I’m not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
Thank you for your feedback!
I think Lemmy.world should not have 99.999% of communities.
We can have one fediverse community but it should not be on Lemmy.world. It’s already extreamly centralized with almost all users. It should have all communities as well?
I feel the same about every other duplicate community. Because i actually care about having a decentralized fediverse.
.ml also has a lot of active communities though. While I agree .ml is better than .world, feeding any one of these won’t be good for decentralization anyway.
Completely agree.
Pushing for https://lemmy.film/, literature.cafe/, https://mander.xyz/ etc. as much as I can, but the established communities usually have the natural inertia working for them.
Just picking from those two, but yes, I agree. I would put it on a instance that is below the top 10 instances, and I would do the same for all duplicate communities.
I think this is just another variant of FOMO. You don’t need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that’s it 🤷♂️
I’m not sure it’s FOMO. The main issue I see is that communication to the audience (in this case, everyone interested in the Fediverse) is either cumbersome for the poster, or lacking for the audience.
I usually see people not knowing about some tool for Lemmy (link the instance link switcher or the account sync app) because it was posted on one community, and not the other they are following.
It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.
I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.
Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
Part of beauty of federation is that you people see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
Due to defederation policies, it is required to reach everyone.
Hexbear, the 8th largest instance in the fediverse, cannot see fediverse@lemmy.world.
People on Lemmy.world don’t want to subscribe to fediverse@lemmy.ml because they want to boycott the Lemmy admins
Audience fragmentation is real.
Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I’m interested in a topic I’ll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice.
Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation.
That’s exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
OK, so defederation causes the problem. Having a unique community cannot solve that. But I’ll forgive you for posting twice, if that is the reason.
As discussed elsewhere, having some kind of neutral instance with no user, a single !lemmy or !fediverse community, federated with everyone, could be a solution to this specific issue. Hard to implement, but on paper an interesting idea.
Think United Nations applied to Lemmy.
Yeah, a community overrun by fash will die. Not gonna work.
Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single one.
@theKalash
> Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single oneI’m confused by this. I’ll admit I haven’t used Lemmy much yet, but I thought communities do exist across all servers? So if I join “c/fediverse” on any one server, and you join “c/fediverse” on any other server, we’re joining the same community. Is that not how it works?
You can have the same community on different instances.
For example !asklemmy@lemmy.world and !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Your terminology doesn’t make it clearer. Those are different communities, with different members, moderators, rules, and content. They just happen to share the name “asklemmy”, have a similar topic, and sometimes overlapping content.
How will they merge moderation then? Every instance has their own set of rules. If it’s done automatically, it will cause a lot of trouble in a long run.
Doesn’t have to, it would just be on the user end.
Like on reddit you could do multi-reddits, for example I could type in r/anime_titties+worldnews+news and I would get posts from all 3 communities in a single feed.
Oh, got ya! That’s a neat feature, for sure. But it doesn’t fix this concern:
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I’m subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it’s a bit annoying. But it’s also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don’t, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
With all the defederation going on nowadays I’m happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn’t participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.
But that’s the issue, it’s not because there is another version of the community that exists on a different server that people will rediscuss there what they already talked about on the main community, especially with the current low number of users.
You see beehaw users complaining about not having access to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works , because while there is !patientgamers@lemmy.world , it has two posts that are 2 months old
But then the OPs solution of closing !patientgamers@lemmy.world and only allowing !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works still doesn’t help the people on beehaw. What those users can do are 2 things:
- Post more interesting stuff to !patientgamers@lemmy.world so that it attracts other people
- Lobby for federation with sh.itjust.works on their server and deal with moderation
Indeed, but that’s when we hit one of the limitations of the current Lemmy population.
Solution 1 cannot really happen as there isn’t enough user to maintain a patient gamers population on a second community next to the main one. To be honest, the main one should probably need a few more posters too.
This is what the whole post is about: the current Lemmy population cannot sustain being spread so thin over so many different communities. We should consolidate a few ones.
Due to the features of the Fediverse, once (and I say once and not if, because I still hope one day it will be the case) we reach a large enough userbase, then users will be free to open their own communities, in a similar way we now have !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id
Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.
Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
No, please. Most of the defederations are for a good reason. In !fediverse@whatever I want to read about fediverse, not racist bullshit and spam.
That’s an interesting question.
I just had a look at lemmy.ml block list, and EH are blocked.
I guess at some point you just have to block the bigots.
That’s not actually how defederation works. You would still not be able to see those your instance has defederated from.
I mean, that’s exactly what I want? Defederating from the spammy and racist instnaces means I will not interact with them at all, which is what I want - I don’t want to read their racist bullshit and spam. I don’t see where I misunderstood how defederation works.
I’m saying you wouldn’t see racist bullshit and spam in !fediverse@whatever.
If there were no defederations, yeah, I would. I’ve seen racist and homophobic bullshit in a community for my instance news before I defederated.
It doesn’t matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you’re “well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy,” but apparently you really haven’t thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed “we” can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.
I think users should always join the biggest communities, to avoid replicating data and fragment communities.
If an instance is decommissioned, all of its communities are lost. It is mitigated by the fact that no single instance hosts all communities.
The design is not perfect but this is how ActivityPub is designed.
I think users should always join the biggest communities, to avoid replicating data and fragment communities.
I would suggest joining the most active, not the biggest. Some big communities may appear dead, while shine new ones be really active.
Btw, may I ask why is your account marked as a bot?
Is it better now ? (I’m not yet familiar with Jerboa)
Replied to a wrong comment?
No it’s about the bot account flag ^^
Oh, I see. Yeah, it’s fixed now.
