9h ago

Another argument to consolidate specific topic communities: search

Didn't think about it before, but saw this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/26747873

Lemmy tends to have duplicate communities between different instances for many subjects, and this can make it hard to find information here. For instance, if i want to know if anyone has made a constructed language for birds, i have to go to the communities list and search for “conlang” and “constructed language”, open every relevant community i find, and search each of those.

The Lemmy search feature quite good, but having all the knowledge about one topic on one community makes it even better

There is a GitHub issue, but no planned deadline: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

16 comments

There's also the argument that people should get used to the idea of not being force fed from one source/community/etc. Redundancy also has its perks.
Lemmy's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness imo. The decentralized nature makes it much less intuitive to navigate and use when you're new because it just works differently to what people are used to and commonly expect.
Having multiple communities isn't a problem if they aren't dead imo. The problem is a user base that doesn't have a native way to easily access everything on the fediverse (or even Lemmy) from whatever instance they register on. That leaves us with users who simply don't know any better when they look for communities with a local search and can't find them.
I think we need to work on retraining people to search using tools like lemmyverse, or find a way to build its functionality into the default Lemmy search. Consolidated communities only help if people are able to find them reliably and many of the users are brand new and struggle with the transition.
- While I mostly agree, the duplication of shared links is definitely a problem that is frustrating once you have a setup you like and follow a few similar communities.
  
  Yes, having a dead community isn't that big of an issue per se. The worse case is probably when there are two similar communities with the same links posted on both sides.
- Definitely agree. By the way, well done with !pokemonTCGM@crazypeople.online, it's a great community!
  
  🙏
- Consolidated communities only help if people are able to find them reliably and many of the users are brand new and struggle with the transition.
  That's also what I try to do with the pinned post on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
  
  Posts like that are a great resource. Thanks for all the time and energy you put into promoting this place. It's certainly appreciated.
  Part of the problem is we're fighting an uphill battle. After decades of preaching to people on the internet to use the search we've given them one that often can't actually find things for them without some fiddling. New and smaller instances are particularly prone to this. If the goal is being interconnected as a feature we need better ways to make that connection user friendly and automatic.

Search is going to be simplified, as per the comment before yours in the thread that you linked: https://lemmy.world/comment/15652535
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
So this will be less of a problem later down the road, and no need to consolidate communities.
- Just to confirm, this issue is still open, with no planned deadline?
  
  Don't ask me, I'm not in charge.
  It seems a bit disingenuous that that decided to omit that comment in your write-up though.

Where consolidation makes sense it's always good. But part of what makes Lemmy special is that there's multiple communities about different subjects. For example Technology. I don't fuck with the LW community at all, but I'm a regular poster in the BH community and regularly post in the more technical PD community. If all were consolidated it would alienate me as I don't actually wanna deal with a bunch of people that post in the biggest communities. It's also why I subscribe to communities and avoid the ALL feed.
I feel you're making a dangerous assumption where you feel everyone should want to be part of a centralised community and that's not what Lemmy is about. Sometimes smaller communities just wanna be that.
- Oh, I definitely agree!
  Technology is a very widely discussed topic on Lemmy, so having different communities makes sense.
  I was more thinking about the case above. I don't think conlangs have enough of a user base to split across different communities, with adding hurdles to search for content about that topic on top.

16 comments