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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.

150 comments
  • 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 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.

  • 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.

      • There isn’t one “most active one” because federation isn’t perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.

        Number of users is pretty similar in my experience, with an average difference between 2 and 10 users.

      • 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:

        • it starts with a coward's version of an imperative ("needs to fix") in the title. Look around and you will see plenty of cases of people using this phrasing when they want to give an ultimatum but don't have the means/authority to back it up with a credible threat.
        • It goes on to describe the "problem" but stays in the abstract, without ever giving a real example of its consequences or why it should be so important. IOW, it wants to get other people to worry about something that haven't affected them in a meaningful way.
        • The most annoying thing of all: the author sees a problem, describes all of the possible solutions, but stays away from showing work done on any of them.

        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.

  • 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'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.

  • 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.

150 comments