Confusion around duplicate communities
Confusion around duplicate communities
So I'm assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Is there a way to find/pick the "right" one, or should it just be based on whichever has the most users?
New to Fediverse (here and Mastodon), still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
This is what it is in fediverse. Multiple instances can have same communities.
If I’m looking lulz communities, I just subscribe to those with most users, because most likely it will be more active.
If I’m looking for tech or something useful, I subscribe to most of them, and then filter them after some time. Not all communities will fit your style, and you will have to choose with which community you are more compatible.
I subscribe to multiple communities for the same reason. In addition, the communities tend to be pretty small, and this helps me see the posts that might go under the radar if I otherwise were not subscribed.
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What about this website I’ve been using?
I didn't know this – cheers!
Is that a bug? It would be helpful to see a total number sometimes.
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If you’re looking through lemmy explorer, then you can see total number of subscribers.
to be fair, you can make "infinite" subreddits too. I can make showerthought, thoughtswhileshowering, deepthoughts, jackhandy, etc, etc right now.
clearly in your screenshot, one has risen to the top, so there you go, check done.
As others have pointed out, this is just a natural-- and arguably desirable-- consequence of federation with a reddit-style format. However, I think the problem it causes could be somewhat mitigated by each platform implementing a feature to allow users to group magazines/communities manually-- and share them between instances and (ideally) platforms. Kind of like how Twitter did with "lists". (I think that's what they called them.)
Ironically this will be more useful the more popular the site becomes. For example you could have 5 different communities labeled as movies from five platforms. One platform hosts many people who love, for example technology, one server hosts people from your country, one server hosts "Only X culture allowed". You now have 3 very diverse communities to talk about your one topic. Without having weird specific community topics.
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
- People don't know they should check whether a community already exists, before creating it.
- People search to see if the community exists, but it doesn't appear in the search results of the instance/server they live in.
- People see that a community already exists, but they aren't happy with it and create their own.
It's a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
Also note that in a federated network fragmentation is not bad and this is the shift in thinking everyone needs coming from facebook/twitter/reddit.
Those networks didn't talk to each other so you had to fight a battle to get everyone in the same place for the best experience. This centralized power and data and allowed people to exploit you.
In a federated network, you get the content whereever you are and everyone has incentive to share. Duplicates create a robust ecosystem that cannot be taken down by 1 power hungry individual.
There is no reason to have a single community for any topic.
I agree with your point of view and its advantages. Of course it's also a matter of degree. One can imagine the situation where there's one "copy" of a community per server, or even per person; now this is absolutely unrealistic, but there's a continuity of cases from that unrealistic situation to the present situation. Somewhere along that continuum, fragmentation becomes more negative than positive.
I feel like we need a FAQ to link people to. This is one of those topics that new users post ever few days.
I wish mods would close these threads and point people to the FAQ.
I mean how do these people survive on reddit if they can search but can't click on a big number
Basically the same thing exists on reddit, the names are just slightly different And then there are things like anime tits being a news sub, how is anyone going to search for that on reddit
IMHO, good subreddits have mods and mod bots that shut down commonly asked questions and point the user to a mega thread or FAQ.
You look at each community and decide for yourself if it’s one you want to follow. Just like in Reddit when you had gaming, games, truegaming, etc, each one will have different people, different rules, different kinds of conversations, and different levels of activity.
Oh which client is that ?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !thunder_app@lemmy.world)
Personally i like this. I think it gives the opportunity for each individual instance to flourish or fail.
My only fear is repost issues. Someone could obviously post to ALL those instances if they wanted to and they are perfectly within their right to. But if you’re subscribed to all of them you’ll see all instances versions of that post lol
Iirc if you crosspost properly (using the crosspost feature) it'd just show up once in in the home page.
That’s cool! Didn’t know that
I think this is kind of a larger problem with the fediverse, and ultimately why it won’t displace Reddit.
If I subscribe to a community called music, as a user I expect to see all posts from the fediverse. Instead what we get is posts from a specific instance. Duplicate isolated communities is not user friendly.
Fediverse atm just feels like a complicated reinvention of forums.
the same is true with reddit. They may not have the exact same name, but how many music subreddits are there? I follow at least 5 or 6 on reddit, but there are thousands, many of which compete for the same or sim genres or ideas, but a few tend to be the one people gravitate too and so be it.
I run Alternative Nation here !alternativenation@lemmy.world but on reddit here are 3 of many options, but clearly on reddit indieheads got the users.
I suppose the confusion is because duplicate Lemmy communities across instances can haver the same name. Perhaps a solution to this would be to more prominently show the instance name alongside the community name.
I imagine we will get situations in the future where multiple same name communities gain traction, but may have different vibes. If it was easier to tell apart c/foobar on InstanceA from c/foobar on InstanceB on each part of the Lemmy interface it would be less confusing.
The same is not true of Reddit.
If I subscribe to /r/music, I see all post.
If I as a user subscribe to /c/music on Lemmy.world, I get only posts from lemmy.world.
These two are completely different, and that’s why it is going to struggle.
https://lemmy.world/c/music https://sh.itjust.works/c/music
If we can’t simplify this problem, the platform will struggle to gain serious ground.
if you sub to both you'll see both in your main feed
yes, but if there's 7 of them on 7 different instances it's a challenge to make sense of it all.
Just sub to the ones you want and set your feed to home. You'll only see the single ones you subbed to. And you're right, these are same names in different instances/servers. Completely normal.
Just join them both and forget about it.
I think this is something clients/frontends can fix by grouping together communties of a similar name.
That's what I thought as well. This a desirable but confusing feature which can't be addressed at the protocol level. It has to be interpreted differently at the front-end.
I'm not really sure how it is with Lemmy but kbin displays the instance URL within the magazine search. Maybe you can check the URL of those communities to see it more clearly, but yes, those should be all from different instances. Whether you want to subscribe to the biggest or all of them is up to you, just like you could have subbed to various kinds of subreddits for the same topic.
So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there's a crisis in the 'main' one.
This is a natural part of the Fediverse and no bad thing.
Eventually we'll have multicommunities where you could group all the similar themed communities together into one feed and it won't really matter which one the post is on.
For example, Slide is being ported over to Lemmy and still has multireddits coded in. I presume it will be easy enough to switch this over to communities. I imagine quite a few Lemmy apps will have the same features eventually.
