What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it’s not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.
Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case “communities” would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.
Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.
A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there’s so many categories that could be applied to each.
What are your thoughts?
@_finger_
We can have both generic instances and instances around a particular topic.We already have a few lemmy dedicated to a particular community like latte.isnot.coffee and startrek.website
I think the main point of decentralization is to spread the burden of hosting around so that no individual has control of the system. I think having themed servers like what you’re suggesting would aid in discoverability of different communities, but the downside is that that would mean individual servers would have monopolies on certain subjects.
Exactly. Also, people might not want their handle being associated with a specific niche hobby they have, though they might be there a lot/all the time (e.g. I don’t want to be “ewe@hentainsfw”, but I sure as shit am going to be spending a lot of time there).
I kind of feel like it would be best if we had some “user” instances that are nice and always up and most of the communities lived on “community” instances either grouped or just spread out. That way if any single community gets too big on an instance, it doesn’t necessarily bog a bunch of users down as well (e.g. all the users on lemmy.ml that are hamstrung by being on the overloaded hardware on that instance).
Over on Mastodon I’m at mastodon.world purely because it’s the most generic sounding instance and I don’t particularly want to have my whole identity to be defined by where I live or the operating system that I use or whatever
I guess it’s the point of the fediverse as far as I understand. Kind of like being members of a bunch of old school forums. Unfortunately for me it’s not really what I’m looking for, and I like the unified aspect of reddit.
unified is nice, but if i’ve learnt anything over the past 9-10 years as a redditor, it means you’re at the mercy of admins and power mods. And because it’s become the go-to forum, it’s gotten so much attention from stealth marketers and bots (it’s hard not to unsee such posts once you learn to identify them), and karma whores trying to get the first witty remark in so it’ll get boosted up into the first top-level comment.
I kinda like the idea of a fediverse - it’s like a bunch of forums, but connected in a way that makes it so much easier to browse and read all of them, and doesn’t have the “centralisation of power” problem reddit has.
There’s nothing stopping you as a user from subbing to different communities on all of those instances to get a feed exactly how you like it.
The only difference would be that mods would belong to an instance themed around their interest with a like-minded admin for it. Also, you could pick more niche topics than you can now. Let’s say I’m into tech, but I don’t care about AI. I could go to the Tech themed instance, pick the news and linux communities from there, sub to those and get them in my feed while ignoring the ai related communities.
Unified is bad, always. If you need examples look at Windows, Android, iOS, Facebook, Amazon. Having a large selection roughly equal options promotes improvement AND cooperation. For example the Linux ecosystem is made up of hundreds of distributions that make a number of major choices about their systems but still allow the user to run the same software.
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”.
But you don’t have to create accounts on multiple instances. You can subscribe, post, and mod communities on other federated servers.
Then what happens when the owner of the giraffe instance goes all Spez on us?
Too much control is a bad thing. Let people spread those communities across all instances, otherwise I’ll be asking:
How am I to live without my giraffes?!
What about when the owner of the general purpose instance closes the whole instance over some BS in the WhyIsThisIllegal community and now your girrafe gifs are collateral damage? You going to stick your neck out them then?
Of course I won’t, but, the beauty of this is that you can just create another community in another instance. That way, my giraffe viewing party continues no matter where they reside.
But then what’s the point of separating them into instances in the first place?
The full list of federated communities is getting too big to just scroll and find things, especially since I can’t sort by name. I may not know what community name to search for. There’s a lemmy.studio instance that someone started for music production topics. I can go list communities in that instance to see what I didn’t realize I wanted to. It’s all six of one, half a dozen of the other. We have general purpose and focused instances now, so everybody is free to choose which they want.
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don’t think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.
Hopping between instances would have to be simplified significantly.
I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I’ve never felt the need to hop between instances.
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.
Exactly, it’s really inconvenient right now. And it’s really important for the usability of what OP suggested.
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
And I highly disagree with only being important at the start. It’s a big hurdle that stifles growth right now.
That’s more of the interface you’re using a fault for not interpreting links correctly - it should be obvious that url/c/communityname should be interpreted as a community, just as !communityname@instance.org (right now jerboa is interpreting it as an email address) should also be interpreted as one, and if you remove the ! It should be interpreted as a username.
But most interfaces are open source, so give them time and someone (maybe even you) can submit a pull request that fixes it. That’s the beauty of open source - in time the bugs get ironed out because it’s a collaborative effort.
Agreed, what needs to happen is an option that allows users to follow links from foreign instances in their home instance seamlessly. I have to imagine with the ramped up amount of development in lemmy that some of the devs must be working on it.
You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
I saw that something like !programming@beehaw.org should work. It doesn’t work for me now though
That’s the string you need to put in the search and go through there. Clunky and inconvenient.
The funny part is that the search also returns posts where that link works, but don’t know what the issue here is. Regardless, copy+pasteing a universal link should be an easy thing to do and not require manual typing.
Edit: Okay, so to do those links you have to type it out like you would a reddit link:
[!programming@lemmy.ml](/c/programming@lemmy.ml)which results in !programming@lemmy.mlSo it’s actually the /c/programming@Lemmy.ml link that make it works like federation, so the ‘!’ has no purpose? It’s weird, I imagined it like @ and # at other platforms, and actually at lemmy’s GitHub page readme you can see they mention the tagging just like that, like it works the same as other platforms. What are we missing here hahaha
No, that’s not right You can follow any community from any instance with your account, doesn’t matter where you registered your account. I just subscribed to https://beehaw.org/c/programming from lemmy.pt user account
this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn’t work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com
Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.
Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)
This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.
On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.
You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.
Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribersClick it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”
Done
Jesus Christ. I’m well aware of how you can subscribe to other instances. This is about convenience, with problems arising from situations like I described above.
Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.
There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.
At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.
I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance.
On lemmy:
- Click ‘Communities’ (top left menu)
- Search using the search box (top right)
- Select ‘Communities’ from the drop down (top left)
- Make sure to toggle ‘All’ (*not *‘Subscribed’ or ‘Local’).
This will show you communities matching your search term from all instances*.
You can then subscribe to communities regardless on which instance they live and use them seemlessly, regardless of wether they are local or not.
*) It will show you communities matching your search term from all instances, if your instance has already discovered that community.
If it has not, it shows ‘No Results’. You can force it by some exclamation mark shenanigans which I haven’t understood well enough to explain. After that, your instance knows about that community in the other instance and will show it in future search results. I think as soon as one person from your instance force-discovers a community from another instance, that community becomes searchable for everyone on your instance.
The asterisk is the problem, IMO. There’s even a (I consider it a) bug where you have to deselect “Communities” from your search and choose “All” if you want to directly search for a community by its global name. Probably some interaction with global names and URLs, but it is a bit unintuitive.
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
I know. We all know.
Convenience is the issue here. You can’t directly go to an instance and start subscribing, you need to take unnecessary detours.
…which would be perfectly fine if we had a better search functionality.
If I search for something I’m interested in in some consolidated place (preferably directly from my lemmy instance or app), and it always finds what I want, and I can always subscribe to it, and links always work for it… then I won’t care about going directly to an instance to subscribe.
I’m currently working on a Lemmy mobile client and have implemented multi-accounts until it’s easier to do this. Basically you can make multiple accounts on different instances and aggregate the data from them all into a single feed. It doesn’t currently prioritize posting from specific accounts (you just select a primary)–I’m trying to figure out a good way to go about doing it so you can section things off 👀
Why do you need multiple accounts on different instances. You can have an account join a community on a different instance.
How? I know I can follow a community but I can’t get a general feed of that instance. That’s the issue they’re solving
Same reason people have multiple accounts on other sites. You don’t always want your comments on local news to intersect your comments in a professional community or your comments on a game site. Storing them on other instances is another small layer of security.
This is good but at the moment the user base isn’t big enough to support splitting interests like that.
I think it will more of less follow that path naturally in the years to come, if it ever catches on. You can already see this happening with some instances (ie lemmy.ca mostly devoted to canadian topics, etc)
You have to remember that the amount of lemmy servers exploded in the past week or so. We’re pretty much figuring this out collectively
waveform.social is handling a lot of music-making topics. I think this is better than simply being region based. I understand the need for communities of different languages but I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions. Instances based on similar interests makes the most sense to me.
It may make a difference in speed if you are closer to the actual server (IE, it’s in your country)
AI and machine learning tech instance over here looking for members. ran themed communities BEFORE reddit and slashdot, doing it again.
Would be nice if it was “divided” by user types too. Imagine a post about a new Marvel movie and you could view a shared comment thread but also filter to remove “marvel-fans”, or see only “cineasts”, without leaving the thread. Could lead to more bubbles, but could also make it really easy to see what other bubbles are thinking.
Currently users of Lemmy are “power users”. The fact that power users can’t even work out how to use Lemmy ‘properly’ is sign of its future
It’s arguably a sign that there is need for refinement, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, jeez. Every platforms’ early days were much like this. Reddit was pretty shit at first. YouTube was pretty shit at first. And so on.
Nothing comes to life without teething pains. We’re literally on day two for most users, it’s bizarre to be saying anything about Lemmy’s future this early.
Idk, I got here and I’m sort of an idjit
Power users?
It’s a term that broadly refers to people with more experience in a technology and more ability to extract use from it.
Unfortunately, unlike youtube, Lemmy has a lot of refined competition already for people to jump to out of frustration
What competition? Do you have links?
I feel like is not necessary because you can subscribe and communicate to subLems from basically anywhere. We’re right now 2 users from 2 different instances talking at a subLem originate at a 3rd instance, but does it even matter? As long as everything’s federated it (basically) doesn’t matter where you’re account is from, and what subLems are originate from your instance. That’s the whole beauty of the fediverse.
PS, I do glad that lemmygard implemented your idea, so because my instance defederate them I don’t have to see those guys ever again (they’re the reason I ditched my lemmy.ml account long ago).
There are some good reasons to do it. You can basically recreate the classic forum experience. Say you want to make an all purposes Blades in the Dark community. You could just make
/c/bladesinthedarkin your favourite instance, but you could also makemybladesinthedark.org/c/generaldiscussion,/c/characterart,/c/gamestories,/c/playbypost, even/c/offtopic, and restrict the creation of new communities to mods, or to admins with an@mybladesinthedark.orgaccount, or something like that. Maybemybladesinthedark.orgis owned by the company that publishes bitd, allowing them to create a series of “official” communities linked under the lemmy network but still locally managed.IMO this is a pretty powerful tool, and while I don’t think it should be the standard, it definitely does ad d cool value that competitors lack.
I get your point, but you could get the same effect with c/subject_subsubject. I guess it’s to the people to decide.
One point against creating a brand new instance i think is that u might miss a lot of good content from other subLems at other instances that exist before someone from your instance sub to that subLem. But it’s a pros and cons game like everything in life.
I’d imagine that this hypothetical forum-instance would be such that the only people with an @myforum.whatever login would be admins/mods of that specific forum, at least that’s how I’d run it. It’d be designed to be visited to, not visited from. The advantage is only that it creates a linked identity, so it’s easy for someone to find all the myforum.whatever topical areas by going to the front page, instead of trying to seek them out through sidebar links. From a “brand management” perspective, though, it gives the owner of that forum essentially full independent control of how they operate, and I think that’s really strong.
I agree that this seems to be the intent behind Lemmy. But, I also think that, right now, there is such a big influx of people that need accounts that we need to route them into as many instances as possible to keep server stress down. And that means that a lot of communities will be generalized by the new users.
I agree with other comment that this will likely happen organically over time. After things stabilize I think we’ll see communities begin to merge with identical or similar communities on other instances. And at that point server admins can start to take a bit more of a firm hand with their instances to try and do exactly what you’re describing, if that’s what they really wanted.
There is already a couple like this. lemmy.dbzer0.com for example is a piracy themed instance, and all communities hosted on it are piracy-related.
Yaargh, matey, I be not aware of that plunderin’ spot at all, arr! Thank ye kindly for sharin’. Ahoy, raise the masts and set sail on the high seas!
My thoughts are what if the instance admins or mods are pricks? What if the instance shuts down?
I think the power of the fediverse is that there is redundancy with the communities on different instances. I feel like it’s a very human need to have everything neatly organized and in its place, but the internet is all about redundancy to ensure no single points of failure.
The fediverse mimics that by creating a web of small related communities, spread out over multiple instances, ran by different people, rather than a giant single community for one thing, on one instance, run by one person.
I think more regional / city instances would be great. Seems like a natural way to consolidate activity around local content, meetups, activism, etc etc while also staying totally connected to everything else
That’s actually a great idea
