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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.
That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — 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 “merge” 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. There’s strength in diversity too.
See though, I still don't see the issue.
How are they spread too thin?
This thread and the OP are on lemmy.ml. I'm on kbin.social. You're on lemmy.world. And the only reason I know all of that is because I checked each one. Until I checked each one, it was just a thread and I responded to it and you responded to me and it all just worked and there was no way to even notice that three different instances were involved, since it made zero difference.
What benefit is that?
Right now, I can go into the list of communities on any instance and search for a subject and get all the communities that are about it. And yes, as I already noted, if I want all of them, then that means I have to click on more than one subscribe button - a few seconds of extra effort.
So the only "benefit" I see is saving myself that few seconds of extra effort, which hardly seems worth caring about.
I genuinely don't see a real problem.
It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.
A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.
I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.
I'm not sure that most wouldn't, but yeah - I don't doubt that some wouldn't subscribe to multiple instances.
I had a whole section here about the notion that quantity equals quality and the benefits of barriers to entry and so on, but it felt digressive at best, so I'll just say that (with multiple provisos) I do at least see how it might be legitimately believed that redundant communities are an actual problem, so that's something.
Thanks for the responses.
We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.
And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.
There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.
But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.
Yes and no.
Much of that bit I excised from the last response concerned the users you're specifying. It is true that I wasn't initially considering them, so you're right as farcas that goes, but...
a lot of the reason I ended up excising that part is that it was an overall shift in the topic. Yes - as I noted, I can see how that "friction" could be considered a problem. But personally, I think it's a good thing.
But again, that's really a different topic.
And as a bit of an aside, it's taking every ounce of my willpower to not translate that admirably diplomatic passage you wrote into less generous terms...
now multiply 3/4 with 30 and you get ~100 communities to subscribe to
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.