tl;dr I'll make my own c/aww with blackjack and hookers

Honestly i thought the point of decentralization was purely from a resoures perspective, the idea of it being a bunch of seperate semi isolated communities seems pointless. The strength of link aggregation is in having a breadth of content while allowing content people want to see to rise to the top for ease of access. I've mainly been trying to just see top for the day for all and it seems a bit inconsistent in what it displayed.

🥈 take my free award. It's yours

I understand the idea of keeping them separate and not forcing them to a single instance since that defeats the purpose of decentralization. But from a UI standpoint it would be nice if you could a user could create multi-communities or groups where the content from all the similar subs you put in them show up in a feed. So if say I want to see c/aww I can have a group I created with content from [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] etc.

If an instance dissappear or goes rogue and gets defederated that content just dissappear. I don't think that breaks the decentralization idea but solves the user problem.

People were promoting tagging on Reddit as early as 2008. They came up with subreddits which did about 50% of the work of tagging, but also allowed communities to stay distinct and establish their own cultures. I think the lack of tagging is what made Reddit so special, and I think Lemmy shouldn’t implement it either.

Regarding redundancy, I agree. I’m from Seattle, and people migrated from /r/Seattle to /r/SeattleWA to /r/seawa as the culture of each shifted. I can see something like that happening here.

Yeah, but not really. You couldn’t create r/Doug twice. You could create r/Dougs or r/Dougie, but not two r/Doug. Here, you can create a “Doug” for every server that exists.

I have hope for solutions though. There’s only about 8,000 active subreddits in total. The cream will rise to the top quickly and we’ll all get used to subscribing to the ‘top 3 or 4’ “Doug” communities and I’m sure the apps developed for Lemmy will ‘combine’ those behind the scenes for a smoother user experience.

I work in a space adjacent to change management (ERP implementation) and honestly, be happy and kind. These questions are the absolute default ones of humans attempting to puzzle out a paradigm shift. And the fact they're here and they're feeling loved enough to actually ask for help with their new mental model of it is about eight degrees better than it could have been.

So my answer is: it's just like r/games, r/gaming, r/videogames, r/patientgamers. They are all the same subject matter with overlapping content and userbases, with potentially wildly different moderation biases and groupthinks. And that was all on one centralised Reddit! You subbed to some, or all of them, as you saw fit, you maybe even managed a multireddit to group them! It's just the same here except they're on different instances and soon, enhancements to Lemmy pending, will be just as seamless to manage.

I think it's just as simple as:

Most people want the decentralisation perk of not having a single profit driven company controlling everything, and that is where it ends.

Other than that, people would rather just have everything in one place where everyone is, but of course that is antithesis to the whole decentralised model.

People have gotten used to the convenience and ease of the silos, and people don't want that taken away.

I keep having this image of the owner of a small cottage who has gradually been making his cottage lovely, repairing bits, adding cozy furniture, hanging out with his friends playing his ukulele on the porch.

The huge apartment building down the road burns down, and he invites the huge crowd of refugees into his cottage for shelter. They immediately start complaining that his cottage is too small, it doesn’t have an elevator, how come there’s no exercise room, ewww there’s cat hair on this rocking chair, that color of pain sucks, how could you be so stupid as to have a slow cooker in your kitchen, we need to add on so tell your friends to get off the porch so we can turn it into a sexy new studio…..

Now what we need are concatenated multi-communities where I can have a linkable collection of each of these overlapping subscriptions at multiple federated instances. In RES they were "multi-reddits" and they were my primary way of compartmentalizing and consuming content.

I think two communities can live side-by-side and even develop their own culture. With federation, someone subscribed to both essentially has no downside right? I think forcing merges would cause some issues (like, who moderates?).

Reddit apps already did this - where you could create a "multireddit" which was an amalgamation of various subreddits.

Ironally it looks like Lemmy actually has some sort of RSS functionality you can tap into to make that happen.

I'm seeing a lot linking other popular similar communities in a pinned post, and honestly I'm preferring it cause you can follow them all - or a more specific 'flavour' of it without getting all the rest. I think the nicest thing to add would be the ability to make a post across communities with features like shared comments and not showing up on the feed twice, so broader topics can still be broadly posed (and not reposted)

Beehaw seems to be coming in strong. I almost made an account on their server but for some reason they don't allow downvotes which I feel could be an issue in the future.

Agreed - this was my initial concern as well but now that I've gotten used to the structure here it doesn't seem like an issue. The whole Digg > Reddit > "New Monolith" wasn't ever going to solve the problem of enshittification, it would just buy us some time, and probably not much at that. This feels a necessary paradigm shift, and the multiple overlapping communities really turns into a failsafe more than an inconvenience.

They all still populate the same on a feed if you're subbed anyway.

I think it's just a problem that will work itself out over time with more users. There are redundant subreddits as well, but as the overall userbase grew only one or two subs maintained the subscriber growth to continue showing up on r/all. And in cases where redundant subs both grew together, they evolved to be very different atmospheres. For example, r/games vs r/gaming; one is focused on news and discussion while the other is mostly memes. Both great subs, but started out nearly identical until they found their identity.

You might be completely incompatible with federation. I mean this with zero ill intention, it just might not be the alternative YOU are looking for. Reddit and lemmy are separate projects with separate goals and means. Centralization is what led to the issues leading to people exodusing from Reddit, but now everyone is upset that it's not centralized here. If you want one single set of users crammed into one single set of communities, this just isn't it by design.

As somebody who likes sharing my opinion and bickering about them, I've run afoul of power mods on Reddit in the past and been blanket banned from like 8 subs at once for liking firehouse subs over subway or some such nonsense. Here, if I'm banned from [email protected] I can still fiddle around on [email protected]. I can spin up my own instance and start [email protected] if I want.

It's important to remember that this is NOT REDDIT. This is a different project with different goals and different methods of achieving those goals. IIRC there are people trying to build a more 1 for 1 replacement for Reddit, and if that's what you want - great! Find one and enjoy it, but don't try to force lemmy to centralize and just become Reddit 2, because that's not the goal or intention of the project.

The reason you want a 100 communities over one is what is happening over on Reddit. Make one big thing, and greed will take over. Make many smaller ones? Is significantly less likely to happen.

Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing?

I believe over time it'll sort out and one community will be dominant. But the reason you want this is so whoever got c/canada won't be dominant. If the mod of c/canada was a QAnon lizardpeople nut, you wouldn't need to make c/RealCanada because there's not a single real c/canada. You would make c/[email protected]

But also, many communities were spread out even in reddit. Like r/traa and r/egg_irl.

Tbh this isn't even unique to Lemmy. Even on reddit, creating a new subreddit is free. If you don't like the moderation or the general vibe of a subreddit, create a new one and build the community that you like. with the ethos that you see fit. That's how there's r/gaming, r/truegaming, r/games, r/pcgaming, r/gamernews, etc.

Reddit also only allowed comments in 2008, and Digg v4 was released in 2010. Therefore much of the reddit "canon" was developed after the Digg migration (e.g. today you tomorrow me, cumbox, forthewolfx, swamps of Dagobah, discoball, jolly ranchers, double dick dude, taco show, broken arms). Digg didn't have custom communities. Reddit did. And now Lemmy has custom communities in infinite instances. If there's going to be a Quit Reddit Day (maybe July 1st?) like Quit Digg Day, we're in the forefront of shaping Lemmy.