this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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math
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General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world
Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.
Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.
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I don't understand, how can there be two if the servers are federated? Don't the communities propagate from one server to another?
No, communities on a given instance are completely independent from communities on other instances. There just happen to be two communities on two different instances with the same name (of course c/math is not the only case of this).
The federation makes it so that anybody on any server which is federated with both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world can see all the communities on both servers. This means you can subscribe to both the c/math on lemmy.ml and the c/math on lemmy.world. The fact that lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are federated with each other is inconsequential.
Thanks, aha, I get it now. So it looks like there are a bunch of communities fragmented between servers, presumably resulting in crossposting and stuff. I suppose that is an inherent feature of the federation scheme and something the designers wanted, but it seems like a mistake to me. Usenet's and Reddit's successes I think came from having unified groups. It shouldn't be necessary to browse 3 separate but similar XYZ communities to keep up with the topic. So I hope that the two math communities do eventually merge. The other one has been around longer but has little recent activity, so we'll see what happens.
Yeah I believe that's a valid point of view when coming over from reddit.
People have been saying (and I somewhat agrree) that it's really analogous to how there can be multiple subreddits with effectively the same topic (e.g. r/compsci vs r/computerscience, r/math vs r/mathematics) and that either:
One will dominate the other in popularity, and the smaller will be absorbed by the larger
They will each cater to different aspects of the larger community they have in common
Point (1) I think has already happened on the fediverse with the de-facto piracy community being /c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Point (2) I believe makes particular sense in the case of lemmy, as different instances will have different themes and codes of conduct and rules of administration. Thus it might make sense for there to be different communities of the same name across different instances, as they might be about the same broader topic but differ significantly in culture.
That's actually why I made this community in the first place: lemmy.ml was never intended to be a general "catch-all" instance, it's just the instance the devs use and has always catered to their particular interests and ideologies. In fact I think ideally if there is to be a monolithic c/math then it should live on some instance more specifically dedicated to STEM, not a general instance like lemmy.world. But again, the problem has re-arisen, as there are many small "STEM" instances now but none are go-to. It's an exciting time, we'll see how it all shakes out.
Thanks for info.
As reddit is dead for me and I'm full time here so I just need clarification whether this community is like r/math or r/askmath before posting.
I read the community info and it says, "no homework questions" that sounds more like r/math. In r/askmath people do post homework questions but have to specify where they stuck and show their efforts through imgur instead of posting question only.