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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
hamsteronvase @lemmy.sdf.org

Do I understand correctly that I have to subscribe to 5 different NoStupidQuestions on 5 different instances?

The content on all the communities seem different.

Why didn't the "copycats" get the "this community name has already been taken" message?

It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.

Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?

I mean, look at this:

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world

No Stupid Questions@kbin.social

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca

No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz

212 comments

  • This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.

    If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.

    It isn't at all a new concept and I'm not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don't feel like you need.

    Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.

    Adding an edit as I've thought a bit more: I think it's important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are 'unlimited' options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.

    This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.

    I think it's lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you'd like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.

    • I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Realx / Truex. Imo I like it this way better because there's less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can't universally squat on a community name

      • I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it's necessary to consider the part after the "@" to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There's no such thing as a community named "No Stupid Questions", with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.

        As an alternative solution there are issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.

    • It's a sticking point because it's new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn't a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That's why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there's a pretty significant chance you'll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities...which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.

    • It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it.

      Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.

      • Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.

        They're different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you're not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.

        1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.

      • There is no "the community", though. These names don't "belong" to any one specific group of people, there's no "there can be only one" mandate.

        As an example of why "there can be only one" is a bad thing, there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn't, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn't like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?

        Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got "taken over" by right wing moderators and those who weren't of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community "Canada"?

      • Starting up is always hard. Short of copying over a subreddit to a declared official new home (which did happen for a few), you have to build up from nothing. I think it's come a long way in only the last few weeks. I've already seen a post complimenting the response time and answers from a Lemmy community when the Reddit posts went ignored, and also I've seen one community owner realize that the other communities of similar names are doing much better and decide to close up. Another group decided the best solution was not to try and pull in other communities, but act as a general discussion that also served to link up the many specific niche communities distributed throughout Lemmy and Kbin. Lastly the attacks on .world and .ml serve as a reminder of the benefits of having duplicity. What if one of those had been a long-time established home of a community with millions of posts and got wiped from such a thing?

        This is evolution in action, what works best will prevail, and part of that will be redundancy and adaptive ability.

    • when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it might already be on Lemmy, not sure)

      For your own awareness, cross-posting is available on Lemmy.

    • This was really well said!!

      I'm here from Reddit and that's what I've been doing, just subscribing to whatever I can find for each subreddit I'm losing, and then whichever one seems like it's either most active or has the most quality content stays and I unsub from whatever sublems aren't providing content.

      This OP seems pissed off about subbing to multiple sublems that are the same but like....you don't have to. Go use Reddit? lol

      The multiple sublems thing is kinda the point of Lemmy, there isn't one big overlord controlling everything

    • Cross instance communities or a way to stich these places together better needs to happen though. Splinter groups making their own community is fine, but there needs to be some main communities for things.

      It's not just a make it more like reddit need. If lemmy.world decides to defederate like beehaw (or goes down), then all that content is gone from lots of other people, and the fediverse as a whole loses. If there exists a way to blend communities, then maybe people only notice less posts on memes rather than just an empty void.

      It's also a huge discovery problem, some people are going to think there isn't an active NSQ community, and maybe try making yet another, because the didn't find the one active community. It's also possible that there's 5-10 small/tiny- communities that could become a single thriving community of they were able to actually discover and coordinate with each other.

      • Discovering new communities that share names and topics will be the biggest core improvement in my opinion. Like having a way for an instance to poll all federated instances for communities with the same name or with a name that includes a term to easily add would be awesome.

        Then the ability to combine them into subsets of your siscriptions by whatever topic you want would be awesome. Like instead of subscriptions as a while you could have 'Tabletop Gaming' with various 40k, CAV, BattleTech, and other games grouped how you want or subgroups for each game.

  • So? Reddit has about 10 sizeable Subs that are just a variation of "Ask Any and All Questions". That's not even counting speciality subs like "MedicalQuestions" or "ITQuestions" or "DermatologyQuestions" or "AskTrangender". Or the different language ones like "FragReddit" (German). In the end 1-3 will become the major ones, all will be a bit different and everyone will find the ones they like most.

  • Some of these duplicate communities are just placeholders. But sometimes, the differences are obvious, where one community Is populated by jerks or modded by power-trippers.

    Over time, the more popular community will become clear by the number of subscribers. (Or the real, topical one will give itself a different name to avoid confusion with the jerks).

  • For now yes, but over time probably no. Multiple communities around the same subject are created on different instances. They'll compete to become the most active one. Then everyone will subscribe to that one, and it will grow even more. However, if over time you don't like that one any more (e.g. don't agree with the mods) you can start a community with the same name somewhere else and compete again to become the most active one (or not, and stay small if that is preferred).

  • No, you choose which ones the best for you.

    • Such as the most populated, most active, or most secluded if that's what you like. It's a good thing OP, we are not locked down to one community in the event that one goes crazy.

  • Pretty much, but i I think as the apps and front ends mature, we’ll be able to set up personal “multireddits.” I don’t mind signing up for the multiple communities because I understand why or is that way. However, do think the instances are forming more from simple load distribution and less from the types of deep seated shared interests that may have been predicted. The result is that there are more communities than expected that might benefit from being "collated", but that will be a pretty personal decision.

  • If you want them all I guess.

    Its a downside but also a power.

    For example, if No Stupid Questions@kbin.social tomorrow decides to add a rule "No Post about cats" there are still others you can subscribe to that won't have that rule

    • And if you don't want posts about cats, you can unsubscribe from the ones that do!

      You will never see everything anyway, might as well narrow down to what you are interested in.

  • No, you don't have to subscribe to any of them, much less all of them.

    There's gong to be multiples with a given name because they each exist on their own instance. Instances are mini reddits that can talk to each other, not the same site.

    You want redundancy, it's one of the biggest benefits of federation and decentralization.

  • Nope, you don't have to subscribe to any of them actually. Look, I'm not subbed to either nsq and I'm good.

  • Just subscribe to everything what's the problem?

    • The only issue of any substance is that I often like to browse a particular community. It would be nice to get some front-end interface solution that makes it reasonable to do so for multiple communities. I’m happy to set it up manually once, but it would be tedious to check in on, say, the mechanical keyboard communities on 5 different instances every day.

      For my main feed, a shotgun approach is absolutely fine, and I wouldn’t want to weaken the benefits of federation by herding everyone into a single instance per “interest.”

      I do think that maybe the Lemmy developers were expecting each instance to have a more distinct character than is happening so far, at least on average. Federation in the threadiverse seems to be acting more like simple distribution, load balancing, and decentralization, rather than digital tourism defaulting to open borders.

      • We should have an option to merge communities in 1 single feed or something. Or maybe a grouping function, where we could name the group, and any communities under that group would show as a single group. Then other people could like your group and also subscribe etc. But that way maybe things could get complicated. I mean for the average Joe it will already be difficult IMO to make the effort to understand the Fediverse. I mean I took my time to understand it and start using it, cause I was lazy and had Reddit. I guess there are no perfect solutions, there's always dissadvantages. For sure 1 thing that is attactive with centralized systems is the peace of mind when it comes to understanding it, because it's simple etc. Like starting using Crypto vs using a bank account and so on. Oh I'm rambling already.

  • I don't understand why some people have an issue with this but maybe is due to the way I have browsed Reddit for years, do with Mastodon now and plan to keep doing with Lemmy though I still haven't finished setting it up. I like having different "home pages", much like in Mastodon I can browse my following feed, the instance feed and the federated feed depending on the kind of content I want to look at that moment. Or all of them in succession if I want to check it all. When I was in Twitter I had to use lists to resemble something like this.

    Reddit was even better for this if you took the time to set it up: if you suscribed to every single thing that caught your attention no matter your level of interest in it your suscribed feed ended up being clogged by the most popular subreddits among your suscribed communities, so you wound up missing out on some interesting posts in your more niche, slow communities. My solution was to only suscribe to the smallest communities where I didn't want to miss a single one of the posts (for example staples like GameDeals or some other minor communities I was temporarily fixated into, like say a specific videogame or themed subreddit -I unsuscribed from those when I got tired of them). Then, slowly and naturally while I browse keep heavily heavily curating the general feed by using the filter/block function, getting rid of anything that didn't interest me or wasn't good for me (in whatever way you want to interpret it, for example filtering ragebait subs) or often innocuous big subs I was tired of seeing or whose whole shtick had grown old. The result was a smaller suscribed feed I could quickly check daily with the reassurance that I wouldn't miss out on anything from those communities and a general feed that was always interesting to me but with the potential to show any kind of new community for me to decide to keep or filter away.

  • I mean you can, but there are instances I don't want to be federated with because of some of the content they host (which is moot for this discussion and I'm not thinking enough into whether they're any of these four). In those cases, I wouldn't want to subscribe to those specific communities. Kind of a guilt by association thing. Shitty, but it's how the system works.

  • Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?

    no

212 comments