This is quite a similar to other recent questions and breaks rule #3 related to using Lemmy.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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For now I subscribe to multiple communities, but I really hope the Lemmy devs figure out a way to let each user create a community group.
The way I envision it is that you can create a group where you can combine communities on your end, and you can then cross-post to these communities when you post to that community group.
On the other hand, there would need to be a way to ensure that cross-posts aren't generating a ton of duplicates to those subscribed to multiple communities, and I'm not sure how the comments on these cross-posts should be dealt with. Maybe the comments should be kept separate per cross-post, or maybe if you have these communities in a group there could be a way to display the comments from there multiple posts together, to ensure all those crossposts have a change to get some interaction on other instances?
Then there's also the possibility of spammers abusing the system.
There is still place for improvement.
I like the idea of viewing multiple communities. However, I don't like the idea of cross-posting to all communities at the same time - it would prevent communities with overlapping topics to diverge and specialise, since people would mostly post the same stuff in all of them.
Instead I think that a multireddits-like approach is better: you group comms for visualisation, and your group can be either private or public. If public, other people can copy your group, so they use it instead of subscribing to individual comms.
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I'm joining all the ones I'm interested in, redundant or not. I'm looking at all the posts, wherever they are, and commenting on them regardless of where they are if I'm inclined. If I want to make a post, I tend to do it on the largest or most active version, and I don't tend to cross post.
The only one I'm struggling with is the technology communities. I am subscribed to 4 of them, but the same user is posting the same articles to all 4, so I see the same things over and over. Since they all mostly have the same content, I want to unsubscribe from all but the most popular, but I'm lazy and haven't done it.
Much like I ignored reddit usernames in the comment section, I tend to ignore which instance a post is coming from while scrolling. So I subscribe to all the relevant ones, and just scroll from my "subscribed" in my instance.
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For all the times I've seen people complain about this, I still don't see what the supposed problem is.
Yeah - it's just a tiny bit more effort to subscribe to three communities instead of one, but then that's it. It doesn't matter in the slightest from that point on, since all three of them are going to come up just the same in my feed.
I honestly think that there really isn't a problem - that really, there's no notable way in which anyone is actually negatively affected. It's just that it's different, and different is bad.
The problem is when it's a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.
Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won't get an answer. If I'm a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective...due to the synergy.
Right, but exactly because that's a thing that people value, the "problem" will be solved organically. Community searches already default to sorting by activity, so over time, one community will come to be seen as the de facto "main" community for that topic. Just as is the case on other forums, except over time and by consensus instead of from the start and by decree.
That's not exactly how it's working in practice.
Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that's kind of how it's working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by "all" instead of by "local", you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance's members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).
Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it's almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.
The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation...fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.
The only way it would be 'solved organically' as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances -- but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.
Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.
Those third party search tools already exist. I expect that apps will begin linking to them or even including their own version of the same function.
And really, it's vanishingly unlikely that somebody so dull-witted that they couldn't even find the most notable instance on a given topic if it wasn't already on their instance's All is going to end up on such an obscure instance in the first place.
Again, I don't think it's a usability problem at all - I think it's just people expecting the fediverse to be essentially identical to the monolithic corporate social media to which they're accustomed, then faulting it for not being so.
I must be completely "dull witted" then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official "join-lemmy.org" website, clicked on "join a server" and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn't know any better.
After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that's all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn't seeing everything?
Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don't, and I'm telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.
Thatβs fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users β and therefore the content & comments β being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the βmergeβ functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.
But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. Thereβs strength in diversity too.
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I subscribe to a lot of similar communities myself, however Iβve recently gone on a bit of a culling spree. It seems a lot of people cross post to the various communities, so I see the same article posted by 3 different people in 3 different communities, and now I have this article about twitterβs rebranding 9 times.
Since my app doesnβt mark read on scroll I have to vote on it or open it to make it go away. Itβs not enjoyable, so Iβve just been limiting my engagement to only the more popular or active communities.
now multiply 3/4 with 30 and you get ~100 communities to subscribe to
If it's a niche interest such as photography, I would just subscribe to all and see which one is the best over a few weeks.
If it's a more dynamic topic such as technology, I will go for the most curated version if it (Beehaw communities are usually good ones, at least to me), and only subscribe to one. Otherwise I'm getting overwhelmed with multiple occurrences of the same article.
It's not too bad, minus people crossposting the same content across each instance
The way I see it, some communities will thrive and others will die. No need to worry about the mess in the process. For now during this early stage just post to all of them or pick one you like and stick with it.
I have been thinking about this problem recently and believe the solution may be a new fediverse protocol/service that provides:
- Federated Emergent Topic Taxonomies
That is, a model of the relationships (e.g., is the same as, is a type of, is related to, etc) between different communities (/groups/services/instances, etc.) that emerges from the way that users/servers interact with them, that different servers can maintain independently and merge or split by consensus if they choose. Then other services (like Lemmy instances or clients) can tap into this information to provide solutions to problems like the one you describe (e.g., a feed of all the photography communities, regardless of which instance they're on).
I think there are several big conceptual and technical challenges to implementing this. I'm keen to discuss them.
Does anyone know where I would go to discuss this with the people who care, have struggled with developing new fediverse protocols and/or are best positioned to spot the flaws and possiblities in the idea? So far I see mostly w3c working groups taking behind closed doors.
My guess is the various Android & iOS clients will add this feature to combine similar communities and view all of their content together in one feed (like multireddits on reddit).
But I hope this feature is implemented at a system level in the Lemmy software itself.
I think many people may have already requested this as a feature on official GitHub issues.
To me this is basically a necessary feature of a fediverse app that wants to be similar to Reddit.
Smaller communities are fantastic, but one of the unique appeals of Reddit was that for the largest communities, they were likely one of the most populated communities for each topic available. So posting to that community ensured the broadest reach, and greatest likelihood of engagement or getting one's questions answered.
I hope we can find a federated way of providing a similar experience. Perhaps via replication between instances.
From a user front-end standpoint, just collate all posts with identical links and then make a tabbed system for comments. Lemmy.ml comments are on this tab, kbin.social comments are on this tab, etc etc. Seems like by far the easiest way to present it without (accidentally or otherwise) force-federating all of the source material. This could even pretty easily ("easily", yeah I'll get right on that) be done within the app if not done in the lemmy/kbin source code directly.
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I'm not, I just post/read/comment wherever. Sometimes the same articles will pop up repeatedly but I just ignore them.
Yea, idk if I'm doing this right but I subscribed to a lot of duplicates but on different instances. My hope was that gives me more content I'm interested in to look through easily. Then I do what you said, ignore posts if I've already seen them and comment anywhere.
I've never much cared for the details of a lot of communities/subs outside of very specialized ones. I'm going to participate if the topic is interesting and learn about the rules as I go. There being multiple communities for the same thing was pretty common on reddit.
Iβm currently subscribed to duplicate communities, which works well except for the crossposts being a little annoying.
I started by joining only one instance (vlemmy.net). When it went down, I realized I needed more, so I joined 3.
As for the communities, I subscribed to whichever clone had more traffic, among the ones I'm interested in.
I comment and post from whatever instance I'm logged on, as sometimes - especially in the recent weeks - one or two are temporarily down.
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To be honest, I don't even know what instance I'm looking at most of the time. My app doesn't show the instance name, only the community name, and the community names are often all identical across instances.
This is how I use the site:
- Sort by New Comment
- Scroll through feed
- See something that interests me or makes me think of something I think is clever/witty
- Open the comments
- Read them/post my own.
- Continue to read them and post replies until bored.
- Go to 1.
I'm posting to the communities that seem active enough for me.
I don't even know man this shit is so confusing. I used to just comment and upvote when I saw shit I liked but now how will I know if the shit I liked came from one server or another. This is just madness we can't keep treating people this way!
That's the thing, you don't have to care which server is comes from. You can just comment and upvote as usual.
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