I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.
The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.
Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.
Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.
The basic tl;dr: is that posts and comments are shared and copied between federated instances, which is why I’m signed into the reddthat.com instance, yet can see and interact with your post and comments on lemmy.world, and vice versa. Instances can defederate from other instances, stopping that share of information, which is typically done when an instance has objectionable content, is being swarmed by bot accounts that spam other instances, etc. For example many instances are defederated from the nsfw instances, so if you want that content, you have to make an account local to that instance, or on an instance that has chosen to stay federated with them.
I don’t feel like that answered the op question. As an example, every general ‘gaming’ instance that is federated can see each other, so I subscribe to every one I can find, but then I get some posts four times in a row (or more) with varying activity. (Hence the split community point).
I wish communities could be grouped in some way.
Either they go by the wayside or take control of a topic as of now.
Also, what if I’m subscribed to the community that isn’t the active one, I have to constantly find new ones to keep up instead of just my feed for that topic?
Edit: part of growing the community has to be ease of access to content, that still seems limited on lemmy, for now
That’s a problem anywhere with user generated content & user defined communities. The usual example is that when BOTW came out there were at least half a dozen subreddits created and more than one survived, so there were two that were both really popular at the same time and that’s in addition to multiple Zelda and multiple Nintendo subs that might all get the same links/posts.
That’s a fair point, but one wins out usually, where with the lemmy numbers they seem to remain split with the smaller communities.
I’ve been on lemmy for several months now and most communities are completely split and activity on any given ‘news topic’ (as an example) varies widely on 0-50+ comments for the same topic popping up on the feed from several identical communities from varying instances. (Which is why grouping might be an alternative solution)
or not 🤷♂️
Sure it’s more practical, but your whole community (as in “people”) is now centralized on a single point. If you have a single one “gaming” community, and it disappears or is taken over, you lose everything and need to start over from scratch. If you have 3-4 communities spread across different instances, if one of those communities become unusable, it’s easier to abandon it to become active on the next one.
Decentralization is not a silver bullet, but as we’ve seen during the last year with Twitter and Reddit, it’s better than the alternative. Nothing prevents you to subscribe to several similar communities, each with its own flavor, and participate in the one(s) you want.
It would be cool to be able to just combine the content at the user level. You could have all the gaming communities you like under a custom gaming label, with a filter that checks for duplicate titles or links (wouldn’t be perfect but decent) and imports in the comments from duplicate threads (with some subheadings or something to distinguish their origin)
Why couldn’t one of the communities abandoned just be dropped from the ‘group’ then. Or have Moderators from several communities work together to moderate a larger one. They are still federated, just working together. If one becomes obsolete, defederate it or let it be. Why should I have to be subscribed to the same topic several times to find the discussion?
Well then you should have replied to the OP so they got this explanation instead of me. Or have provided some explanation that does answer the OP’s question, because that doesn’t seem to either.
I was just addressing my concerns with Lemmy, for now. One of my suggestions (grouping communities) is one that could solve some of the issues with op’s questions.
I agree on that point. I find myself wanting to block the extraneous news communities to only see one copy of a story instead of six, but have no idea which ones to consider the extras.
Same, on many topics. How would I know which community will have the most activity, or none at all. It’s my biggest issue here. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.