If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.
‘Stop asking this’ is not a really helpful thing to say. We have a lot of new users, including myself, and everybody is figuring out how Lemmy works. Redundant questions will occur and lets answer those in a respectful manner.
Exactly. I was subbed to both meirl and me_irl without issue
Reddit does not have the problem in the exact same way. To have to articulate the nuance would be exhausting and clearly not productive. Please continue to ask that question until this community has a valid answer.
I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.
Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.
Lemme give my case.
I see what you did there.
Didn’t intend to do that, but hey…
I don’t see this as an issue. One of two things will happen:
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Each community that has similar or same topics will begin to specialize: ie: the 25+ Apple subreddits. These communities will then become (if I have the nomenclature correct) “Comminities” within an “umbrella” topic.
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If there are competing communities with a narrow topic, one will prove out, or if one goes off the rails, another will spin up to replace it. The Fediverse is, like a mesh, self healing.
The goal here is not to try and artificially constrain Lemmy to the limitations of the Reddit architecture, but to explore what is possible within a federation structured “information aggregator.”
Personally, my experiences on Lemmy have not differed much from Reddit, with the sole difference I did not need to purge a pre-defined Front Page. The only thing I really miss are some of the specific subreddits that have no analogs in the Lemmy Fediverse; and the ability to aggregate “like topics” as I did with multi-subreddits).
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Yea, it’s an endless debate lately.
Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it’s possible the small clones will be left behind.
Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.
I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.
it matters a lot. if something is happening you want a quick overview of big discussion and not jump between a bunch of 10 small discussion rooms.
Reddit also has a bunch of homogeneous subs. Not a problem.
I raised that concern too. As I understand it, there are a couple of different answers:
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Some people seem to feel that one version of a community will eventually become the clear preferred choice, and users will migrate from other communities to that one. I think that will only happen when there is better implementation of the ability to find communities, particularly by activity. Right now that’s not at all easy within Lemmy.
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It can also be argued that smaller duplicate communities are more in keeping with the spirit of the Fediverse. That they will keep resource use divided among servers, thereby not burdening any one server with enormous amounts of traffic. I’m not sure that I’m convinced by that one.
I suggested some possible solutions, and I believe that the devs are at least aware of the issue. But I’m sure that they are beyond overloaded right now. My guess is that they are simply doing everything they can to keep Lemmy running under the impact of the Great Reddit Migration.
I wish there was a community for suggesting improvements and new features for Lemmy. Maybe there is one, and I just don’t know about it?
Feature requests make more sense on the Github issues list, and there’s a LOT of stuff there already. But in case you’ve not seen them there’s !lemmy@lemmy.ml (direct link) for general discussion of the platform and !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml (direct link) for tech support.
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I don’t really see the issue. I’ve subscribed to Technology maybe 4 times now? All that means is I get more tech in my feed. It doesn’t really matter which specific community it is, does it? If there is an interesting tech-related story or news item I’m bound to get it on one of them, or all of them, and each post might have its own insightful comments on the subject. It’s just more content and more opportunity for discussion. I think Lemmy will excel at bringing forward content in this way because you can sub to many different communities around a singular topic. You’ll never be limited to just one place like a subreddit with mods who shape the content you get to see. If any one community started to be artificially controlled like this, there are 3 more who aren’t.
Users who are looking for larger communities can just dogpile whatever is popular and users who aren’t will find something that fits them better just as they always have. I think some people do struggle with not having the massive fire hose they are used to though but everything starts somewhere; it never was going to be everything to everyone all at once. I’m personally finding not being lost in a sea of noise to be more engaging.
I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance