Seeing a big “politics” community in both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world just confuses me as to which I should be subscribing to and I don’t really want to subscribe to both.
Guess this is just a downside of federated instances? There’ll never just be one “/r/politics” on Lemmy?
I strongly prefer it.
It’s a much more organic reflection of older systems. It used to be that there were local newspapers, national ones, and international ones. I want the same thing with my memes. I want a place I go to see what the hot movies and games across the world, and another where discussions are mostly people in my geography or who share a common set of tastes with me.
This idea that the internet should flatten the world into one monoculture has been, in my opinion, both naive and destructive to a lot of tastes that don’t align with the dominant tastemakers.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
When I look at the many communities with the same names, I completely stops me from interacting with them. Most of the time I know they’re going to be copies of each other with a bunch of duplicate content reposted to infinity.
I think your example is interesting but i disagree with your assertion that it some how facilitates finding niche content.
For example it would be difficult to have to explicitly know that
obscure-instance.xyz/c/gameshosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands andprogramming.dev/c/gamesis actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nlandgame_designoffer a significantly better user experience. If we want to make the fediverse feel accessible to people, it has to be easy to find what you’re looking for.This whole thing feels like crypto where everyone has their own coin and they only kind of work together if you have some kind of exchange and some people accept Bitcoin and not Doge. It’s just too complicated for non technical people.
First, if it helps, redundant communities will solve themselves. We’re in a period where people are trying stuff out, but if one group is just a weaker duplicate of another, everyone will eventually just coalesce around the slightly better version.
As for the general complaint, I can see your rationale. But I think a better analogy instead of cryptocoins – which were all essentially useless ponzi schemes and ego projects – would be bars.
In theory, you don’t need two (or more!) sports bars on the same block. But there’s a reason they stay in business instead of one owner just expanding to serve twice as many customers. They have different vibes based on different people. One might dig soccer more, or have a better selection of craft brews. Even though they’re superficially similar, if you ask your friend, “Hey, do you want to go to X?” It’s not at all weird for them to say, “Eh… let’s to Y. if you want, we can stop by X later.”
You know what I mean?
The bar analogy is interesting but is missing the most important factor: All of the bars have the same name. The only difference is where they are located. Now I have to go to each one because I have no idea if they’re a soccer themed bar or a karaoke bar.
Even if the redundant communities somehow solve themselves (which I doubt), there will forever be an abandoned community polluting the search results because no one is going to delete it.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that !memes@slrpnk.net are gonna be lefty memes, and the memes at !memes@lemmy.ml will be generic, and so on.
There are some where it’s less distinct. Technology@lemmy.world and technlogy@beehaw.org are not so easily differentiated, but at the moment they have totally different content on their frontpages, so I have no complaints. Over time, I expect both to evolve, most likely in different ways.
I think the search problem will get resolved over time. Currently, search is very rudimentary, and barely useful for finding new communities. As it becomes better and cataloging communities it can also become better at downranking or excluding communities below a certain activity level.
The name thing doesn’t seem that complicated. I already know that !memes@slrpnk.net are gonna be lefty memes
Lol. I can only assume it’s a massive joke and I’m just not in on it. !memes@slrpnk.net in no way means “lefty memes”. It only proves my point
Well… are you subscribed to !memes@slrpnk.net?
I don’t expect you to know that Gerry’s Bar and Grill is a gay bar or that Fanatics is a Packers bar by their name. You find out by going there.
What’s more annoying to me is the few users spamming every instance non stop with “engagement” content. Like dang bro chill this isn’t about karma.
Some people seem to have gotten the idea that Lemmy needs to grow and to do that it needs all this drivel posted to it. Not sure why tho.
Possibly because if comms stay empty for a long time, people will search for content elsewhere, and lemmy get forgotten.
Remember that many people come from reddit, and are searching for a place where new content is easy to find.
To make matters worse, I’m on Beehaw, which has defederated from Lemmy.world, so I can’t see the politics community on there even if I wanted to.
It’s one thing having different instances, but quite another when users on one instance can’t see the communities of another.
On the other hand, having two different communities does mean that people in my situation could still participate on one of those.
I am new to this side of the fediverse. Why did Beehaw defederate?
Lemmy.world had open signups. There was a large influx of trolls that took advantage of the open signups to do so and then brigade Beehaw. The Beehaw admins like and respect the lemmy.world admin and anticipate defederation.
Refederation! They anticipate refederation! DAMMIT
Beehaw defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because both of those instances allow(ed?) registering without email verification/captcha. They said it is bringing bots and spams. Haven’t seen this issue personally. I recommend being a member of an instance that still federates with both lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works and Beehaw.
I don’t like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don’t know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it’s possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. “Cats” and it’s shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.
This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
I found out quickly that the instance matters. California at exploding-heads is not the same thing as my California, and they won’t be talking about fun hikes to do on the weekend over there.
It just feels like forums of old to me
I don’t think it’s bad, every instance has slightly different moderation rules. Reddit also has multiple variations of one subreddit, like offmychest and trueoffmychest.
I’m probably going to be writing up a guide that tries to use non loaded language to describe the different flavors of lemmy for when my friend joins when Boost becomes available. But I actually really like that there’s !politics@lemmy.world and it’s very centered, there’s !politics@beehaw.org and it leans left, and there’s !politics@exploding-heads.com ans its very right wing conservative. I want to make a guide because I think the downside is none of the domains clearly denote the makeup of the moderation teams beliefs without some investment into exploring the fediverse and seeing what’s what.
If one sucks we can just hop to the other one. I like it.
Reddit had duped of everything too. I’d rather subscribe to both and move my thumb a quarter centimeter to scroll past a dupe. I can deal with that.
Yes it is. But that doesn’t mean we should congeal onto one. Instead I’d strongly prefer clients being able to merge multiple communities into one feed. That way, if a node “drops” (defederated, closes, technical issue etc) the congealation (I’d like that to be the word, please) would still survive.
Discovery services could then be built around popular congealations.
Just like multi-reddits used to do.
Instances are like countries that have their own values and rules. For example, technology@beehaw.org will not be the same as technology@lemmy.world. Beehaw is a heavily moderated instance, while Lemmy.world is more “free”. What can be posted on technology@lemmy.world will not necessarily be the case on technology@beehaw.org.
It’s okay for general topics like politics, news, ecc but for specific ones is just a waste to have multiple communities. Eventually, with more people joining lemmy, only one community per topic will prevail, I hope.
Why does it bother you?
Actually, I kind of like this aspect. I digress … yes, there will just never be one !politics because this is the feature of the fediverse. The idea is that, should you get banned from a community for politely expressing even slight disagreement, there could be a community on a different instance for you to join or you could form your own . Sometimes mods can be heavy handed and the decentralized approach to Lemmy helps to lessen speech being stifled. Some people get some mod power and it goes to their head.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
Once this lands it’ll be all the positives and none of the downsides, so, meh.