"Federation causes too many duplicate communities"
Dopamine go brrrrr
Dopamine go brrrrr
Honestly it's a good thing that communities are able to replicate as many times as they want. which ones is the "offical" one is just a matter of people settling down after a while
It can be a little annoying, like when Sync announced that they're doing an app for lemmy, and then your whole homepage becomes "Sync for lemmy is happening!!!" BUT the upshot to that is a ridiculous amount of redundancy. If a community mod or instance admin goes on a power trip they can have an iron grip on their little corner of the fediverse, but nowhere else. They won't be able to stop the signal unless they decide to go nuclear and defederate which seems to be a taboo and option of last resort.
edit: stupid brain got the app name wrong
Oh shit, I'm sorry. It wasn't RIF it was sync
https://pawb.social/post/146852
My brain is mashing things together apparently
People act like Reddit only had one cats sub. Or as if there was only one forum on the whole web that was about Linux. Is there only one channel on YT that covers iPhone?
Like why exactly is it a problem there is a bunch of comms with roughly the same concept? Subscribe to all of them, post to the biggest one or to whichever you want. Big friggin deal.
Besides the majority of people only lurk anyway.
"We only need one official sub!!" — Average Kbin/Lemmy newb
"First time?" — Average Linux distro enjoyer.
I honestly find it crazy how so many people actively demand that competition and choice should be minimized and are breaking down at the thought they might need to follow more than just a single source of information.
If you think about it... That's scary.
It's true that there were multiple subs for the some topic but there's always one that is "the main", usually the one with the most obvious name. Say /r/gaming. Not the only sub about gaming but that one was huge. You subbed to gaming and you were done
Here I subbed to gaming@beehaw.org, then I get defederated for no reason. I subscribe to gaming@lemmy.ml, no big deal. Now it seems like, games@lemmy.world is getting some serious traction. Fragmentation is a serious problem. Yes, I can subscribe to all of them but I also have to constantly be checking if a newer community is out there. The search function is also quite bad :/
Hopefully in time this will sort itself out.
But the subs with obvious names like r/gaming were also absolutely useless especially if you wanted to ask something, because they'd get a thousand posts a minute so your post would ether get buried immediately, deleted by mods for no reason, or, if posted a stupid meme or catgirl in a bikini, go viral with a trillion upvotes and 500 years of premium from the awards.
So you'd end up going to a niche sub anyway.
Yea there are issues here and there, but understand that 95% of Lemmy users and the whole network have only been around for 3 weeks. Of course there will be birthing pains, especially if everyone just expects a 1:1 Reddit replacement.
Also, the backbone of federation gives additional possibilities to solve this.
As the technology matures, there's no reason why gaming@lemmy.world and gaming@lemmy.ml and gaming@whatever.com can't be combined into whatever we're calling the equivalent of Views in SQL. Multilemmys?
Each individual community remains there in the background (across the whole fediverse) , but for reading they're already curated into a combination by instance admins or users themselves.
This would also give UX continuity for users if any particular instance went offline or defederated.
Yea but the more I'm using Lemmy, the less I care about some universal community umbrella.
The word right there - community - means some specific identity and togetherness. Even if it's something generic like technology, I can imagine the people involved in those comms feel connection to it, and wish to share that connection to the users too. At least that's how I feel about starwarsmemes.
Putting everything into an anonymous basket means loss of that identity by default, unless the user actively seeks for it.
Which I think is the wrong approach. I keep saying that humans have evolved to exist in smallish groups, communities. Societies who keep existing in such way are happier than those who gave that up for industries, cities and whatnot.
And it's not like having an identity means people and communities can't cooperate, Fediverse clearly shows how we can.
It only requires a little effort from the people to familiarize themselves with some specifics instead of just blindly consuming the newsfeed.
A tiny bit of effort.
If we can't give or expect even that, then what is the point of all of this?
I'm super new here, and have just started leaning on lemmy vs Reddit. Would it make sense to allow browsing by topics? Could communities use tags to identify their interests?
I like Lemmy and want it to succeed but fragmentation and instances defederating each other is a problem, especially in these early stages. It's not a moot point, it's a valid one.
I'm not saying it's moot, but it's also not such a big deal as it may seem. It took me maybe 3 days to get used to the concept.
But also I've also been fairly active trying to build up the communities I care about, like this one. So what I mean is that nothing is stopping anyone from building up a community to make it the go-to place.
I get it that it may not be up to everyone's taste, but that's what Lemmy is - a diy project we kinda need to finish and polish ourselves. If you just want a finished product, well, Reddit is always there, and we know how that worked out.
but I also have to constantly be checking if a newer community is out there
No you don't. That's your choice. You don't have to get every single piece of news instantly. The news that was posted to the brand new community you don't know about will make it to the communities you are subbed to after some time.
Hopefully in time this will sort itself out
It will. Smaller communities will either die off or find a specific niche not covered by larger communities. Also, users will give up on trying to see everything and just curate a feed that can keep up with.
Yes, it's my choice but I don't have to be pleased about it. Right now, the communities are very fragmented and it's a time sink to find which horse to bet on.
Maybe you have a higher tolerance than me for this issue, most less tech savvy people will probably be even less tolerant than myself.
I actually subbed to one of the smaller ones because I liked the content better with fewer people. I think /r/games instead of /r/gaming
But for some more niche things having people more spread out is certainly not ideal, but like you said I think that will sort itself out over time.
I swear so many of these arguments against moving to lemmy have 0 thought put into them.
Wait, maybe its better that they have these qualms then...
I think that, in time, some types of communities will naturally coalesce around some of the larger communities. It's nice, though, that there can be multiple communities aimed at the same content but with different moderation teams.
I mean, the same was true with Reddit. The only difference here is that communities can have the exact same name so long as they're on a different instance.
Agreed, the communities will start to naturally merge once one is more active and others begin to get less so.
Reddit already had multiple communities for the same topics. I don’t know why people are acting like this is exclusively a fediverse thing.
200,000 Star Wars Memes communities so far, with another 1,000,000 well on its way.
(p.s. sorry about the inaccurate quote, it's been a while since I watched all six Star Wars movies in one sitting.)
You got just plain /c/aww, /c/female_aww, /c/old_aww, /c/boastful_aww, /c/hulk_aww, /c/trickster_aww, /c/alligator_aww ...
I imagine it’ll consolidate over time. But I don’t know if it’s better or worse to have one gigantic community or many small ones about the samething
I mean - so did Reddit. So many subreddits are the same with extremely similar names & topics but some rise up with lots of subscribers and some don't, staying smaller, and some just never take off and die.
There's no stopping me from starting r/awww, r/awwww, and r/awwwww to compete with r/aww if they are available.
There's no such thing as too many communities.
There's just people who want to be able to just go to one great big content trough and stuff themselves full of whatever swill happens to be there at the moment.
