I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:
- If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
- If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?
I was subscribed to android@lemmy.world, and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.
Are you saying that if you are subscribed to a Baseball community, Lemmy should sub you to all the baseball related communities whether you consented to it or not? Is that really a good idea? And kinda sounds like you want an “algorithm” to make decisions for you.
And if you search for a “baseball” community you should see the all relevant major communities across federated instances come up anyways, so I don’t think there is a problem there.
Tbh I do want an algorithm to make decisions for me. It’s something I’m missing a ton from Reddit/Twitter.
Discoverability is shit on this site. It’s like that because there’s no other option in the current system, but I fully believe federation won’t ever take off mainstream because it’s decentralized.
100% agree discoverability can be improved but I think algorithms are basically the antithesis of the Fediverse.
And it’s totally okay if Lemmy or other Fediverse apps never takes the “mainstream”. I’m totally onboard with it not going down the road of Reddit.
This wouldn’t be an algorithm. This would be the moderators of ‘tadpoles’ on someinstance.social deciding they would also like to display content from ‘tadpoles’ on someotherinstance.xyz
Then provide an ability to consent.
My point is that there could be a nearly identical community elsewhere that I would never know about unless the community I’m subscribed to straight up tells me it exists.
Early Lemmy adopters seem to think that being hard to use is a good thing. The algorithm boogeyman isn’t going to get you if there’s a way to subscribe to baseball@* with a blacklist.
If it’s nearly identical then why does it matter which one you sub to?
Being hard to use isn’t a good thing but also isn’t always a “bug”. Some of the Fediverse behaviors are by design as an antithesis to bigcorp centralization like Reddit - the point IS to have that level of autonomy and separation (instances and individualized communities).
I get that what you described isn’t exactly an argument FOR centralization but my point is it’s not as big as an issue and it will probably shake itself out. You might argue that it’s a huge blocker for Lemmy to go mainstream, but that’s not the point.
If you’re looking at pictures of cats, it’s not a big deal. If you’re asking for support with a niche operating system, it’s nice to know that what you’re looking at is the entirety of Lemmy’s resources without having to manually check that a new community popped up or federated in. Which is something that’s happening a lot as Lemmy gets more popular.
It’s sounds like we disagree on the benefits of decentralized communities. And I do understand your thoughts, I just think that the tools for finding content should be more automated to get the full benefit.
Have a good one
