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popcar2 @programming.dev

Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

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  • 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

    • I hope they can revisit the idea. There are many cases of duplicate communities splintering the community, making finding content more difficult.

      • Do you have an example? Because all the evidence shows that people want to be seen when they post, and will naturally gravitate towards the most active communities, except if they are against the instance the most active community is.

        • Because all the evidence shows...

          What evidence shows that? This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There's also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I've seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there's still no consolidation.

          You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I'm subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn't happen.

          • What evidence shows that?

            The merge of the cooking communities I shared with you in another comment: https://lemmy.world/post/7578470

            This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.

            Didn't find it in https://kbin.social/m/fediverse nor in any other community except lemmy.ml (2 comments)

            Don't you think that we pretty much consolidated around fediverse.world?

            For Linux, the main one is !linux@lemmy.ml.

            For movies, the most active is !moviesandtv@lemm.ee, there is also !movies@lemmy.world, but it's getting less and less active, so we'll probably consolidate around the first one soon.

            Gaming is an interesting choice, there are a few of them, but each have their reasons of existing

            There are others, but the interesting aspect is in this case, every community has enough people to stay active.

            • I don't think we've consolidated around fediverse@lemmy.world. You're using a single post as an example. I've posted links that got 40+ comments in fediverse@kbin.social but way less in other communities. I've posted or seen threads in fediverse@lemmy.ml that got more discussion.

              The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn't sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I'd bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to cooking@lemmy.world anyway.

              What I'm talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren't necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They'll see communities they're interested in and sub, but then won't see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.

              Even if consolidation is happening, there's a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find movies@a.com or movies@b.com but if they're grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.

              • If you want an example of community consolidation between different servers, there is !unixporn@lemmy.ml and !unixporn@lemmy.world. Most of the activity if happening on lemmy.ml, and there was a backlash when the mods from the sub wanted to takeover the lemmy.world community. Both are still open, but someone who wants to post would see that the LW isn't as active as the .ml, and post to the latter.

                About your point, there are two things at hand.

                First, the technical possibility of it happening. It has been linked elsewhere, the Lemmy devs are not interested in this. Kbin has it, somehow, but the userbase is now on Lemmy, and I don't see it moving the Kbin/Mbin, except if they surpass Lemmy in features. Maybe sublinks will have this, we'll see.

                But beyond the technical aspect, there is also the "political" aspect. People who don't like communities on LW are not going to enjoy being forced to have their content shared to LW communities too. People who avoid Lemmy.ml due to the political stance of the users are also not going to be happy to discuss with the people they are trying to avoid.

                The point is that Lemmy has been around for some months now, people know each others, the other servers, and more or less where everyone stands. If people keep communities separated, there is a reason, and it's not going to be solved by technical measures.

                • the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

                  I know. I'm the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn't it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

                  there is also the “political” aspect

                  Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

                  Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

                  Your arguments against it seem to be:

                  1. Its not needed. - I've pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn't happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don't have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don't know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you've centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
                  2. People might not want it - The proposal doesn't force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities' members.

                  I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don't understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn't disrupt that. Either the communities you're in don't join up with others or they do and you wouldn't notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

                  • Lemmy has been around for years, not months

                    Let's be realistic here, the large majority of people came here around June last year. I knew about Lemmy before, it had a few hundreds users before that.

                    Everything about the proposal is optional. I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that.

                    Well, someone has to implement it. It matters to me because the developers of whatever platform we are talking about, be it Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, Sublinks, have limited time and resources. Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy due to the lack of moderation tools. This should be prioritized to allow more people to come to the platform, and have it as a solid alternative to Reddit beyond memes, news, tech and open source. To me, it's strictly a question of prioritization, and that's why I'm not in favor of dedicated effort into this while communities are already moving around organically.

                    • The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

                      Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

                      I've seen ppl saying they don't want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There's also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they're still filed on various projects' trackers.

                      I think it's higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don't think we're gonna convince each other so I'm gonna bow out here.

                      • I think it’s higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don’t think we’re gonna convince each other so I’m gonna bow out here.

                        I guess not, but that was a cordial exchange. Have a good one.

150 comments