Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes. I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the pa...
I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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.
Indeed, if these places are able to survive, they'll survive. No need to force it.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society. Half the reason I'm here is to build. Not consolidate.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society.
This is a brilliant and eloquent observation. My only concern is that younger people (and more specifically younger people from North America, the dominant demographic here and on reddit) never even had a third-place to begin with, so they wouldn't know what they are missing.
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'm aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don't think this means there isn't an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn't a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:
I don't think each one of these communities has a different audience. It's the same audience, but there isn't an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.
Id say that the obvious answer is the Linux community with the most members. !linux@lemmy.ml has more than double the number of subscribers of the next most active Linux community.
In this case, it's the first, which is obvious based on the number of subscribers and active users. You don't even need a third party tool, it's literally in the sidebar
It happens! I moderate !hockey@lemmy.ca, and recently !hockey@lemmy.world merged with us naturally.
, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
[citation needed]
I don't see any community that has been mechanically, forcibly moved over to another instance. I can still post to !cats@a.net and !cats@b.xyz separately.
Cooking communities merged:
That's what I meant with natural merging of communities
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.
That's exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.
Why couldn't this be solved at the client level? Whenever you go to a thread, the client could check the submission URL and inline comments from matching posts from other subscribed communities.
Reddit already does that with their "related diacussions" tab. It would be a lot more elegant, requires no extensions in the spec, no changes in the server side and easily prototyped/tested.
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.
The third solution wouldn't cause extra communication. If you're subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That's the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.
If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It's the same amount of communication.
I'm assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn't explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn't mean you can't maintain similar communities without merging them.
If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.
Oh that's a very good point! I had the wrong impression there was extra data sharing needed in this case but yeah, looking back it makes sense that the amount of data transfer is about the same considering the focus is on the verb (actor A sends to / pulls from actor B) rather on who is doing the action.
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").
To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.
Freedom! Freedom to crosspost between 20 identical communities!
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.
People are pushing for it because they see the amount of people here as a finite number that shouldn't be spread too thin.
I'm more on the side advocating to get more people here so that we don't worry about how many communities we have on the same topic
I completely agree. Having multiple communities is just the way to keep things democratic.
Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it?
That would be pretty great, tbh. But what many demand is more like cross platform multi-player than this.
If I play Overwatch, I want to be matched with other people playing Overwatch. I don't care what network or platform they use to access the game.
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.
Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.
No, it's not always obvious which is the "main" community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.
It's not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It's social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can't feel it because it doesn't directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.
I'd also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy's github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.
Everyone convincing each other in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner.
So when people vote according to what you prefer, it's validation of the problem. When they don't, it's "insanely toxic and dismissive". Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?
Who gives a shit about user experience anyways?
This is a type of "faster horse" case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in "centralized system" mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.
there are many communities that died due to lack of traction.
Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.
To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.
Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn't enough people interested.
What would help is that people stopped trying to find a "canonical place" to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it's been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.
Go for the most active one
There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.
The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.
I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.
federation isn’t perfect
Again: so what? It's reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.
You can’t guarantee that.
You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn't bother me, and I truly don't understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.
Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn’t decentralized.
Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls "Thinking in Words". If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it's easy to coordinate a move away.
Why can you never make your point without being combative and off-putting? I've seen you do this many times. I communicate with very helpful and enthusiastic people who have blocked you or warn others from engaging with you because of your abrasive comments.
Too much time living in Germany, sorry. ;)
Seriously, though... Look at the submission:
I have all the patience in the world when someone starts an argument from the position of a learner, trying to understand the situation and willing to accept that they are the ones that need to adapt to something new. But when someone starts arguing already from the position of unearned authority (like the title) and wants to turn "their" problem into other people's work, then yes I will respond in this abrasive way.
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.
I think it's fine if multiple of the "same" community exist.
If I were on Snooface and wanted to share/discuss a new game would I do it on, r/Gaming, r/Games, or r/TrueGaming? (Or yet another.)
If two communities are EXACTLY the same, then sure, merge them, but they are never EXACTLY the same.
Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities
They are already implemented on /kbin - as Collections
Huh, maybe I should switch to kbin/mbin then
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.
Reddit has a large enough userbase that duplicate communities can each reach a sustainable size without interfering. The fediverse userbase isn't large enough to sustain even a single community for some topics, let alone duplicates. I'm in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn't a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.
Also, reddit is a centralized system. A decentralized system is going to have problems that a centralized one doesn't
I’m in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn’t a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.
Any examples of those? What prevents those communities from merging?
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.
A lot of communities fracture due to bad mods.
Grouping them all together kinda undoes that and become a clusterfuck.
Grouping them wouldn’t mean merging them. For a lack of better terms a Group (multi-Reddit) would allow each indexed community to retain its independence.
But I do see your point about bad mods. Leaving a rotten community in the index has the potential of making the group look bad. However, that’s where the beauty of federation comes into play where users can unsubscribe from those undesirable communities from the larger group.
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.
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.
Lw is still on the previous lemmy version. I hope they'll upgrade soon
Just waiting for thing to stabilize on 0.19.X for a week or two. If 0.19.3 proves stable, then we will move 🤞
Should be fixed by now with version 19.2 and 19.3
That's probably to do with the federation issues that cropped up with the new Lemmy version at Christmas.
Honestly the Lemmy main devs just aren't that great amd their hardline ideology pushes away plenty of potential help.
No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.
You didn't read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I'm not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.
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.
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.
That seems promising
I'm not a software engineer by trade so no guarantees, but I've been wanting to improve it in some way. I still have yet to understand how Lemmy works, but from using Lemmy I've identified two big areas that could use improvement:
Community Tags: Mods being able to tag communities on topics for better aggregation of related communities.
Post Flairs: Users/Mods being able to assign a flair to a post for better client-side filtering of posts, from either a pre-defined list or freeform based on community preference.
For ActivityPub compatibility purposes, either of these could potentially be analogous to Mastodon hashtags, but I still have yet to decide on how that would work especially without it becoming tumblr level.
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:
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.
Obsessive and narcissistic because there are many duplicate communities and it's frustrating to try and find out which ones to use? Okay...
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.
It just sounds like you didn't read the post and made up a narrative in your head about what it's about.
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 do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances,
If they are willing to cooperate that far, they could as well merge the communities
That's true. I guess I like the idea of being able to distribute a community across servers, but it may be more trouble than it's worth to implement.
And then the users who were in the moved-from server but are defederated from the moved-to server get automatically banne d/ blocked from it.
Thanks but no thanks. Sharing is the solution, not merging. Merging is the solution that corporate sells for every problem.
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 honestly don't see a reason why anybody would want something like that
Famous last words.
What about the (non) fictitious problem when you have several (similar) communities dedicated to the same topic on the same instance? What then?
Same solutions apply. They don't have to be across different instances to be able to group them somehow.
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.
1 is absolutely the most important,
1 is literally the worst of the three, opening the Fediverse to a death at the hands of corporate. And I've already explained its other issues.
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.
I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.
This problem is part of why there's not enough activity. Any activity that happens in the threadiverse is spread across multiple, duplicate communities. That makes it harder for communities to build up active userbases and makes users themselves less likely to post or comment.
In theory yes, but everyone posts to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml, so I haven't seen this becoming a practical problem myself.
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.