this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Technology
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My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called "Books" on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You'd have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.
Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I'm subscribed to the "Literature" community here. It's nice. But it's entirely disconnected from any of the "Books" communities on other instances. I'm not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there's a plan to eventually allow "MultiReddit" style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.
What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I'm not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.
I don’t think of that as a negative. It’s a different structure than Reddit.
Each instance would be a community in the cultural sense. All of the Lemmy communities within that instance would be a place for primarily the same instance users to gather. Each instance having its own cultural identity. Decentralized.
I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different "gaming" subreddits that are only named different because that's the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.
Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I'm trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.
Similarly, I'm mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.
I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy 'all' community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.
There's pros and cons to both centralization and decentralization. I like the idea and the goal of decentralization and federation but you run into issues like this, that are counter-intuitive and will be a road block to broader acceptance. Especially with smaller communities.
I think having the option to aggregate those communities into one view could bridge that gap. Have it be optional. Heck, even allow users/servers to block specific communities if they want.
I like the idea of Lemmy but I don't like the idea of having to subscribe to 7,10,15 different versions of a topic of interest spread across 25 different servers. Let me sub to "Technology" and have a toggle to display "all Technology communities across federated servers".
I’m of no doubt that apps will eventually allow users to manually create multi-Lemmys.
I just think we should kind of chill on trying to 1-for-1 replicate Reddit, or ask for all the features straight off. Reddit has been around for over a decade and the apps and ecosystem have matured a lot. Some of that takes time to happen, since internet communities drive sites so I’d rather give it a bit before making changes.
I don't think I want (or was asked for) a 1-to-1 replica of Reddit. Like I said, I get the pros of open source and federation. I'm just pointing out an immediately apparent pain point that I'd like to see be addressed at some point.