2y ago

Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice?

Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

people having to subscribe to both to see the content
posters having to crosspost to both
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

76 comments

I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it's indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post
Kind of like a symbolic link
If not that then give us the ability to have relative references to posts inside of Lemmy. Instead of referencing a URL to a specific instance, kind of like the ! Or @ for for community names and usernames.
Then across post could at least link to the canonical discussion for talking.
- ActivityPub wise this could be modeled pretty cleanly as (what Mastodon calls) boosts. Or perhaps quote boosts as implemented by every software except upstream Mastodon (including Mastodon forks like Treehouse or Fedibird), if different comment threads are needed.
  Hell, let's make cross posts work like that.
- In the meantime, third-party apps can combine posts from multiple communities (that have the same URL) coalesced one single post, and pull comments from every instance's post.
  
  Automatic merging of that sort is problematic as each community can have significantly different rules, conventions, moderation strictness, priorities and overall "vibe".
  
  Yeap, this is the kind of improvement that needs to happen at the client level, not server.
- I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it's indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post.
  This is effectively how the Community-following-Community proposal works. I’ll repost what I commented in this thread:
  I still believe the best solution is the ability for Communities to follow other Communities. That is essentially a fully automated version of this sibling proposal.
  This has been explained in great detail by ‘jamon’ here:
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecomment-1595273502
  This basically lets Communities opt to federate directly with other Communities, abiding by the same network dynamics as the fediverse at large, I.e. cross-network moderation by (de)federation.
  Here’s a succinct description of the problem that C-C following solves:
  If you are an active user (not moderator) of Lemmy, the requirement for this becomes apparent almost immediately. One of the biggest strengths of these forum are communities-at-scale. Being able to easily post and interact with large groups of people is the benefit to the user that makes Lemmy (and all other social media) appealing.
  As a user, I recently wanted to post to AskLemmy. Almost every single instance has thier own separate AskLemmy implementation. Naturally, I'd tend to post to the one with the most users. But inherently, I'm missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to AskLemmy@lemmy.ml (which had 3k users), but by doing that, I'm missing out on the users from lemm.ee, behaw, lemmy.world which in total are far more than 3k.
  There is already a FEP for this functionality: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366?u=erlend_sh
- I think Lemmy should come up with a meta cross post type. Where the post only exists once, but it’s indexed in multiple communities, and moderators of those communities can remove the cross post. Without affecting the original post
  Some discussion about how crossposts could work differently
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3827
  If not that then give us the ability to have relative references to posts inside of Lemmy. Instead of referencing a URL to a specific instance, kind of like the ! Or @ for for community names and usernames.
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

Did I just read a complaint about cross-instance posting, that was cross-instance posted?
- I wish it was. This is a disconnected duplicate, not a proper cross-post. Actual cross-posts are linked to each other in the title section, making it easier for participants to visit the other discussion(s).
  
  Important to note: linked crossposting does not currently work with discussion posts, just links.
  
  Do any apps support it yet?
- Demonstration of the current issue

I think the mods of the duplicate communities should join forces, agree on uniting the communities and close all but one (the other pointing to the united one).
I don't think there's really a good reason to keep communities split. (there are of course contingencies where it makes sense, like rogue mods etc.)
- I don’t think there’s really a good reason to keep communities split.
  The federated nature of the fediverse with all it's implications.
  An instance hosting a community might
  become unstable
  disappear forever
  defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
  same for the instances of other users of that community
  Communities can have the same topic, but differ in
  moderation style
  policies regarding if and how bots are allowed
  I think it's good to have some redundancy both as a backup and to have some choice. As with all things fediverse, we don't need to find a consensus. Those who like to have one big instance or community can join the biggest. Those who prefer some diversity can spread out and create duplicates. Reality will most likely always be something in between.
  Another approach could be to ask: Why are communities split? If you're right and there's really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often? Maybe the prevalence of the phenomenon hints at reasons which exist, but are not well understood.
  
  An instance hosting a community might
  
  become unstable disappear forever defederate or become defederated from/by my instance same for the instances of other users of that community
  I kind of get this, but:
  it seems premature to split the community "just in case"
  this is largely a technical problem. IMHO communities should be federated in the sense that losing the instance shouldn't automatically mean the community is lost.
  Communities can have the same topic, but differ in moderation style policies regarding if and how bots are allowed
  Also possible, but in most cases a large majority of community members can certainly agree on some compromise.
  Why are communities split? If you’re right and there’s really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often?
  the lack of community federation
  "my instance is better than yours" - which IMHO originates again from the lack of community federation
  some mods just like the unrestricted power over their fiefdom
  
  Communities can have the same topic, but differ in
  Communities can also look like they have the same topic on the surface level, but be completely different when in the context of their own instances. The obvious example is "news" or "politics" or other "real world things" communities on separate country-focused instances, but also "news" on an art instance could be dedicated to "art news" or "writing news" in a writing specific instance.
  Or the distinction could be more subtle, like a tech community on slrpnk could focus towards more eco-friendly viewpoints to news about tech compared to a general purpose instance's tech community. Or Beehaw, for example, seems to lean on more "serious" talk and discussion (or I imagine it would given it's history, I avoid visiting too news-heavy communities due to vaguely gestures at everything) compared to, say, .world which really seems to embody Reddit's free-for-all vibe.
- Didn't .world admins force-reopen the Android communtity here after they decided to merge with the community on lemdro.id? I'm not sure how well that's gonna go with this community considering at least 2 mods here seem to be admins of .world, unless the community on .ml comes to here.
  
  This did indeed happen. The mods of the LW Android community decided to migrate and merge with the !android@lemdro.id community. Most people were fine with it, but several very vocal people were not. There was much vitriol. In the end, the admins re-opened the original LW android community with new mods.
  I'm not really sure this is such a bad thing. The two can co-exist. I think most of the anger of the few vocal people came from disliking the Reddit r/Android mods. It does frustratingly split some participation though.
  Disclaimer: I am the founding admin of lemdro.id, however I do not mod the android community on it
  
  Hmm, what was the reasoning for the force reopening?
- Yep. Make it so the mods choose to "federate" with the other communities. Otherwise you might have something like news@america.site and news@europe.site which would merge despite having two different purposes.

people having to subscribe to both to see the content
Not a problem. Just subscribe to both. It's no big deal.
posters having to crosspost to both
Don't do this! The above "issue" already solves this. If I want to see posts from both communities, I'll subscribe to both communities. Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.
- The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
  Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
  On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
  So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice, otherwise the audience they want to reach won't see their content.
  Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.
  That’s exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
  
  It's your choice where to subscribe, and your choice which instance to use. Problem solved.
  
  It would be nice if they developed some way to merge communities and splice crossposts together. This is a common issue with many communities.
  
  The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
  Besides Beehaw, have any other big instances defederated from lemmy.world? I don't think defederation is a widespread issue.

That’s part of the fediverse. It will be a obstacle for communities that will keep them from getting Reddit sized but decentralized means they aren’t supposed to get too big. I think the best compromise would be allowing you to create multi-communities on the front end or in the client.
But end users may not want to federate with Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml or overzealous moderators may ban a user on one instance and for that reason I’m not in favor of consolidating communities. I’d rather both grow organically
- I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.
  Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.
- more discussion about multi-communities here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
  and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

Let it be. The duplication problem is all over the Fediverse. Over time some of those communities will die out and some will become more distinctive or specialised, attracting specific engagement in their own right; the problem will solve itself.

As someone else mentioned, this sounds like your FOMO on your reasoning. But more than that, having a single instance would actually hit less people ultimately. What happens if the combined community is on an instance that is defederated from others? The other people won't get or see the message. What would the alternative be? To force defederated instances to get combined communities? At that point you're breaking the underlying nature of the Fediverse.

I like having different communities on the same topic having completely different posts. Makes things feel less boring.
- The issue is when it's the exact same content, just duplicated, which is the case for the Fediverse ones

Respectfully, who cares?
Hard truth... you're not important. None of us are. No one cares enough about your opinions that they need you to "maximize your reach" by posting in multiple places. That is entirely a you problem, not an us problem.
No one is forcing you to post everything multiple times to multiple communities. You're free to choose one and post to it. if it's interesting enough, someone will likely share it to other communities. And if it isn't interesting enough, they won't. Simple as that.
that's... how... it.... works
Also, you talk as though browsing r/all on Reddit doesn't also show multiple copies of the same post sent to multiple communities. Of course it does. Declaring something the "main" community isn't going to change that anyway.
- I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.
  You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.
  That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?
  
  Thank you for your comment.
- This is a really shitty way to express your disagreement.
  And the fragmentation is definitely an issue worth discussing. It's a lot more prominent here, in my opinion, than reddit, and that could discourage potential users.

I think from the technical point of view, it should be possible for users to merge multiple communities into one. I think the git software could be a great template for achieving this. The admins of each community would only be responsible for their instance of the community. The same merging could apply to comments.
The big challenge however would be to automate this into a seemless experience for the user. If the goal is to attract more users, the user experience has to be on a tiktok level of simplicity.
An additional problem, where I don't have an answer yet is: What is supposed to happen if two communities start in the same way, but develop into different directions?
Edit: Seeing the new comments: I like the social approach of admins coming together and collaborating in a single community even more. But it would still be nice, if a community could be hosted on multiple instances at once, for redundancy.

It's unfortunate, but I doubt anything will be done about this. Guess we have to get used to seeing the same posts, and repeating ourselves in threads a lot.

To be fair, to some of us this is a feature not a bug.
A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don't want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
There are smaller dedicated art focused instances popping up too. I'd expect that they're going to have a better set of conversations around those subjects than the same threads on a general instance and I don't want those mixed up.
If it's a subject I really want to see a lot of discussion about, I'll look at multiple threads... can this mean that some subjects won't have as good of a conversation because people aren't bouncing off of each other? Yeah, absolutely and that frankly SUCKS, but, as stated, it also means that some of the niche conversations have a chance to grow where they may have previously just been unseen due to how many people are talking.
To me, they're on different instances for a reason, let it grow organically. The ones that stand out will wind up being the main ones people use.
As for amount of users. A decent amount of those are likely alts people created when instances were having problems or just to try out the different locations.
Or, people just didn't like the Fediverse for all the reasons you stated, which is also possible, but I don't necessarily think chasing numbers should be the end all goal
- A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
  Completely agree, and I mentioned that in the post as well.
  The issue with the current two Fediverse communities on . world and .ml is that they are pretty much the same. There is no adding values in posting and discussing the same things twice.
  
  Yeah, but, I don't see how that really changes anything.
  On a smaller instance (or one that's defederated from others ... in either direction), that might very well completely shift focuses.
  For the Fediverse specific community, if you want one with the most chance of getting to the developers, use the instance that they're on, otherwise, I'd think to just let the cultures develop and diverge naturally as they're likely to.

- You don't have to have an account in an instance in order to subscribe to communities from that instance. You only need one account and you can subscribe to any community.
  
  Unless it's defederated

I know some people are going to complain about me saying this but I think that it's good to have two separate ones for redundancy in case an instance is down, because when the instance goes down even though the copies are available posts made to them don't get federated to others, they're essentially only seen by people on the server that posts them.
So it's good to have multiple versions in case a server is down so that at least one of them will still be federating correctly.
- You could have the same security by having "Fediverse - Main" and "Fediverse - Backup", making it more clear where people should post to

Close the one on Lemmy.world to promote decentralization.

76 comments