1y ago

Simplest solution for fragmented communities: Redirect comments to one post (by asking or with new functionality)

EDIT: Thank you for all the great responses! I agree that a forced implementation is no longer the way to go. I've left the post as is, aside from this comment, in case anyone wanted to reference part of it. At this point, I think implementation 1 (Sincere Request) is the way to go if anything.

I've seen a few of these posts, some with really cool solutions, but a lot of them are difficult to implement, or complicated for casual users to understand. Here is my proposal on how we can coordinate communities that share the same topic, while also keeping the spirit of federation.

This post has some general thoughts on why I think this is the best solution. It also has some possible implementations, including a trivial one that works already without any automod or code changes.

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27 comments

I don't think that fragmentation is always a problem. And, even when it is a problem, a lot of times it'll solve itself - users tend to congregate in larger communities, if everything else is the same. And when a piece of discourse is relevant enough, it tends to appear in all relevant threads.
Regarding the implementations, locking posts (partial or completely) and redirecting users would introduce problems like this:
You'd create situations where the users can't discuss the topic, because they're being directed to an instance that defederated theirs.
Sometimes userbases simply don't mix well, like water and oil, and redirecting both to the same threads will end disruptive and annoying for both.
So as silly as the first idea (request) might be, I think that it's the best of the three.
- The problem really is that lemmy doesn't have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it's entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.
  If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it's a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.
  
  The fact that discoverability is so bad only reinforces the tendency to gather on larger comms - because it'll affect the most the smaller ones. I also believe that the demerits of the idea would outweigh the merits for the comms that already reached a local critical mass, and that's bad because most interactions happen on them.
  IMO @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz's approach (handle it through the interface) is a better approach. It doesn't handle the problem of discoverability, but that could be addressed other ways (such as ~~multireddits~~ multicomms).
  
  Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.
  As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms...I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn't a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there's never any activity and they don't go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?
  As a real life example of my own, I'm a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn't congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.
  I don't know exactly why that is, but I've had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you're in?
- Users congregating in a larger community has its own problems if that is on an instance that, for some reason, ends up being defederated by many others. I wish the communities could exist independent from the instances, a bit like usenet.

27 comments