For example, I’m on Lemmy.ml and I’ve joined !photography@lemmy.ml, !photography@lemmy.world, and !photography@kbin.social. In this example, it’s not very different from the number of similar groups on Flickr but, in comparison to Reddit, it seems like the decentralized platform can be a little unruly.
How are you going about joining different communities and managing your engagement? Are you only participating on the community on your instance? Are you joining and posting in as many instances that seem relevant?
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.
nope, users MUST not create groups and cross-post to these groups…
I don’t want idiots to put gonewild and technology into the same group and see their dicks in my feed… I’m fine with boobs, but no dicks.
Some restrictions could be added to avoid dumb mistakes like this, like how you cannot add NSFW and non-NSFW communities in the same group
- Rikudou_Sage ( @rikudou@lemmings.world ) 2•1 year ago
I mean, adding a cute dog photo to a Linux subreddit is not ideal as well.
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.
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.
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.
I subscribe to a lot of similar communities myself, however I’ve 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 twitter’s rebranding 9 times.
Since my app doesn’t mark read on scroll I have to vote on it or open it to make it go away. It’s not enjoyable, so I’ve 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Huh, never thought about it this way but it makes sense. Ultimately the URL will be identical across the different posts, and I believe a
Postobject has a URL field.
I’m currently subscribed to duplicate communities, which works well except for the crossposts being a little annoying.
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.
For some cases, like photography, pets and landscapes communities, where I probably will not comment, I decided to follow them on Mastodon instead of Lemmy. This way I can keep my Lemmy timeline cleaner.
I’m posting to the communities that seem active enough for me.
It would be great to be able to merge communities and filter duplicates. Kind of like multireddit.