Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

I don't think I would ever be in favor of activity that leads to further centralization. I don't disagree that fragmentation can make things somewhat confusing for new users, but there are some advantages as well. I like to post to smaller communities for the most part rather than the larger ml and world domains. The responses are more focused on the topic at hand, the communities are usually less hostile and hive-minded, and having all discussions on a just a few big servers leads to a the problem of having all of your eggs in one basket (ie. discussions and accounts disappearing when these servers can't maintain server costs, the admins move on to other projects, or just poor maintenance practices.) To me it is worth the effort to cross-post and seek out other communities to find interesting content.

I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.

About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.

Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that's fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that's okay.

I've already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it's good that the badness of that "solution" is acknowledged.

As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that's what webrings are for! Let's bring them back from the '90s. Basically get's give the power of "static search" back to the users.

Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I'm wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I'm mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.

I just wish threads using the same link and threads that are crossposted shared comments with a link on top of the comment that said the title of the original post.

It sucks when an article is posted to 5 communities and i have to go to each one to read all the comments. I want to read all the comments about the article in one place. If the thread is about something specific and uses the same link I would still understand the context because the comment would include the link/title of the original thread it was posted to.

There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?

This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.

It's not a problem. It's a great feature. Because there's more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you're free to do so. But I'm also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.

It's always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they're brainless and they just think of Lemmy as "the new Reddit" (or Mastodon as "the new Twitter").

As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a 'problem'? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.

I disagree and think it’s fine how it is. I suppose if two want to link that would be fine but you might as well shut one down and move everyone over. People will always flock to whatever’s the more popular one. This could also flip with a competing community with better ideals/moderation/thoughts for engagement. I don’t see how lumping them all together really helps anything.

This definitely isn’t the biggest issue.

Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities

They are already implemented on /kbin - as Collections

I will never understand why people keep bringing this up as a problem, when the same thing happens on reddit, and no one ever cared.

I think the multi-Reddit approach as the default would work best. Users subscribe to a “central” Group or Topic and immediately pull content from every federated community that self-designates as such.

One problem with this is if the community changes their mind and turns into something else. Either they check a box and designate under another Group or Topic, or get unsubscribed by users manually.

I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don't see an issue with duplicate communities.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366

No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.

I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.

The same topic communities should merge under the same page unless the mods don’t want it.

I think the biggest issue for me with your proposal is any time a single pancake post is made, four communities now show recent activity and are likely to all show on everyone's main feed.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that needing your comments mirrored perfectly everywhere in every community comes off as a bit:

1. Obsessive / Compulsive

2. Narcissistic

I don't need to be involved in every conversation about the subjects I'm interested in, and I don't need everyone in every community to see what I have to say, and having problems with things not being that way, well... It just comes off as very weirdly self-focused.

I mean, this is no different than reddit having millions of subreddits and having multiple posts of the same article in many different ones, with many different conversations.

Also, didn't we learn any lessons from Reddit? Like making each community as big as possible means the community becomes less of a community and more of a chore? It's asking for Eternal September to happen more quickly, by shoving everyone in the same box as fast as possible.

The fact that there's a bunch of splintered, smaller communities is actually what I like about Lemmy.

All this work to make Lemmy "more organized" feels like it's missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.

Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.

Once I thoroughly understand Lemmy's functionality through the Sublinks Re-implementation (since Rust is like Greek to me but Java I know), I want to try and put in a community tag feature that would be able to assemble a feed of communities across the Fediverse dedicated to one topic.

I may take me 6 months to a year if I commit to it, but I do think some community aggregation mechanism like that is sorely missing from Lemmy and could help distribute post load better while ensuring a userbase on non-general topics remain active.

I don't think it's a huge issue, there were often multiple communities for the same thing on reddit

Option c seems far and away the best. The reason I browse certain communities over others comes down to admin moderation. Certain instances have stricter admin control and seek to influence political dialogue one way or another. I just don’t want to get banned again for posting the word “tankie” when it’s entirely relevant to the discussion at hand.

I personally don't think this is a huge issue, but it is an issue. I usually pick the biggest community on a topic, or if there are multiple that are fairly active, subscribe to both/all. The only real complaint I have about it is that users will often make the same post to both communities, so I see duplicate posts on my timeline and the discussion is split in half.

I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances, in a way that they would appear as a single community to users. I don't know how that would be implemented though.

I'm personally of the mind that we should be imagining a world where all 3 of these solutions are at play. 1 is absolutely the most important, and Admins should be taking an active role here where possible (particularly as it relates to dead community cleanup). I personally think they are the missing element needed to negotiate these sorts of consolidations. 2 and 3 on the other hand are pretty simple features and even if Lemmy never takes it on, I think it's reasonable that any one of the new fediverse link aggregators could take this up. The only other thing I'll say is multi-communities absolutely must be sharable. Ideally, it should even be possible to link multi-communities with the "!" syntax or similar.

What about the (non) fictitious problem when you have several (similar) communities dedicated to the same topic on the same instance? What then?

I honestly don't see a reason why anybody would want something like that

Famous last words.

I really don't think this is a major problem for Lemmy. Users won't find the proper community and leave Lemmy, or what's the idea here?

I don't think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.

The real problem is how do we centralize all communities. I mean, there's a Linux community on lemmy.world, but also Linux Web sites, forums, chat rooms, people on Twitter that post about Linux. Sometimes people talk about Linux in emails, or text messages. They're probably having in person conversations about Linux. This fragmentation is ruining things.

Go make your own fork then