Comment by WhoRoger@lemmy.world on How do I deal with "fractured" communities?

One of the biggest issues I’m having trouble getting past with Lemmy is not knowing which communities to subscribe to.

An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?

Is there a way to “clump” these communities together so I can just subscribe to one “multi-community” that houses the posts from all of them?

I hope some functionality like that will show up purely because I need this question to stop appearing every 3 minutes.

Yes, you’ll subscribe to 10 technology subs. Oh no the humanity.

I, too, am annoyed by this one. It’s like people forgot that reddit had multiple tech subs too, you just picked the biggest one usually. This is no different, just nothing is big yet. Maybe its that last part that bothers people.

I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic “technology”, and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we’ll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.

Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let’s you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.

Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.

Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the “metacommunities” they think they want.

But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it’s not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.

Making people go scrounging over ten subs is the ideal way to reduce your subscriber base. It’s also a shitty model for a link aggregator and a terrible way for people to ask questions and get answers. Not all of us have ten hours a day to scroll through multiple communities on the same topic, with the same article posted 8 times with 8 different discussion threads and some goober posting the same inane comment on all eight. It’s a waste of time.

There are perfectly good reasons for similar communities with a different focus to co-exist. Making the Fediverse harder and more Byzantine to use is a terrible reason to want it, though.

But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest.

That kinda misses the point, though. For me it’s more about promoting decentralization than it’s about whether people’s reasons to want to join all communities on a topic make sense (they actually can for niche topics). Without a feature like that, I fear people will just all join the largest community on the topic and “centralize” it.

Not having a way to group communities together will lead to there being a de facto default community for certain topics that most people subscribe to and the rest will just wither away.

Yeah, this is what I’ve been doing, and I expect it’s going to be that way for a while because this is all still so new to so many people

It’s fine, we’ll get used to things in time

I think my biggest frustration is feeling like I am missing communities based on my instance. I have 2 accounts on different instances, 1 I created a few weeks ago and 1 I created a few days ago. On my newer account, I couldn’t find half the communities I was looking for unless I dropped a direct link into the search (looking just for the name didn’t turn anything up). And then when I did finally find them, the subscriber number was different (like 1 community had 100+ subscribers on my first account, but the same community only showed like 2 or 3 subscribers on my second account). Anyway I’m sure user error plays a role in this, but it is not intuitive to me, just yet anyway.

Yea that’s pretty stupid. I don’t see why information about new communities couldn’t be propagated across instances.

Subscriber count is instance-specific I think, which does make some sense but then upvotes are apparently federated so idk

You should be able to see all via this https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

Shit just works should have also a “communities” button at the top with a all button.

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How do I deal with "fractured" communities?

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