This is why users need the ability to group multiple communities into supergroups
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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It can't be on the users. The issue is that 2 communities can have different things going on, different rules, different events. The best way is to some how make hosting the same community across different instances by the same mods possible. Mirrored communities should be a goal, but tbh, it's just not a real issue like the scalability, general useability, and how the hot page is not a hot page, it's a rising page.
The best way is to somehow make hosting the same community across different instances by the same mods possible.
That is absolutely what you don't want.
Let's pretend you used to use Reddit. Let's say you wanted to talk/read news about the latest video games. Luckily "gaming" exists. It's a default subreddit (or it was at one point). That must be the best place to go.
Except... It wasn't really. Some folks thought they could do better and thus "games" was born. So now we have "gaming" and "games", two places to talk/read about video games.
Except... They weren't really. While those subs had nobel modding goals it wasn't long before they too had issues. No, only "truegaming" could really be the best community.
So now you have three communities, run by three different mod teams (or at least three different rule sets), "gaming", "games" and "truegaming". Which is the real community? Which is the best community? If you want to start a new community what word are you going to use? "RealGames"? "BestGaming"? "GamingGames"?
Look at this example. Android. I like the Android mods, but what if I didn't? Or what if I think I can do better? Should I make /c/Androids or /c/TrueAndroid?
The nice thing about the Fediverse is that we can all federate with one another but no one is overly in charge.
Like the former Reddit Android mod team? Go sub to them in their instance. Don't like the Android sub on this instance? Don't subscribe. Think the instance admins have made a horribly wrong decision? Move to a new instance. (For the record I'm fine with the decision they've all made.)
Unlike Reddit there isn't one big stupid CEO in charge. Instead there are a lot of small stupid admins in charge (and I do appreciate their work).
Now, as for solutions, yes discoverabilty for Lemmy should be improved. If I find one Android community it should be easy to find others, and not just communities named "Android", but anything related across the Fediverse.
This isn't all going to be solved in a day. Communities will fragment. Instances will fall over. New instances will rise. It's a little messy, but we'll figure it out.
I don't see a problem with the example you presented. The three gaming-oriented communities you listed all have their own cultures that have essentially become tied with their branding, each with their own appeal. It would be more confusing to have three gaming communities all using the same name but with different approaches on how they manage their communities. At that point, you'll have to create a guide on which instances would have the type of community that aligns more with your preferences.
no. decentralized communities die. no one wants to join the smaller communities, and if they do, they're either an outcast or a contrarian, neither of witch are productive to any community. unless the niche communities start to enable communities to centralize across instances, everyone will join 1 mega instance, and everything else will be left to die just like what happens with every social media format.
I mean Mastodon has thousands of instances, many with thousands of active users and generally they all talk to each other.
The Linux community is wide open. Distros rise and fall. There was a time when everything was Red Hat based. Then Ubuntu came along and taught a whole new generation. Smaller distros like Gentoo got bigger. New distros like Arch appeared. And then some of us realized we actually liked just plain Debian all along. (Sorry Slackware users, I didn't follow your journey). This didn't happen because everyone chose the exact same thing.
Sure Linux distos have a commonality, same kernel (but configured differently) and same applications (but packaged differently), but we have that with Lemmy too. Lemmy speaks ActivityPub. Kbin speaks ActivityPub. (Also Mastodon). But Lemmy and Kbin have different UIs. In fact some Lemmy's have different UIs.
And sure, a community can't be zero people talking. But it also can't be a billion people talking. And yes with Lemmy being newer it's going to be easier to fragment. With only a few thousand active users per instance I understand the desire to stick together. But remember your not trapped on your own instance. Maybe we need two Android communities. Maybe ten. Maybe just one. I already know we apparently can support a shit ton of meme communities.
You're fundamentally not understanding the issue here. Mastodon isn't the same kind of content as lemmy, a link aggregator and forum. Microbloging doesn't have user curation, it has algorithmic curation. The only control you have over your feed on a site like mastodon, threads, or Twitter is by who you follow and they just throw all of those posts into a endless list filled with disorganized nonsense. You don't need to centralize communities there because there is no community to centralize. It's like millions of people are in a room and they're all shouting at once. Link agregators are the exact opposite of this. There is direct democratic curation superseded by moderation to keep communities focused and topical. You follow communities that will curate relevat content to their state topic and if those communities are not centralized you can't interact with them as effectively if they were. There is no reason for any individual game or media franchise to be divided across more than just 1 page unless the amount of topics and content they can produce necessitates dividing specific facets of that community to not cannibalize the limited space the sites format allows for. Some games force esports content into it's own subreddit and this severally hampers the visibility of that game on Reddit, or they divide out the meme posts because the sub is so filled with regular postings and discussion that they would get in the way and lose nothing by being segregated, unlike esports. Franchises like star wars don't have posts about Jedi survivor or the old republic on their main sub because those games generate their own content that most people who don't play those games do not care about. So yes, there are some reasons to divide communities, but there is not a strong reason to make more than 1 community for virtually anything on a site this small. There should only be 1 place to talk about Android here, for the time being, because there are simply not enough people to sustain more than that regardless of what your feeling on decentralizing communities are.
Decentralizing any community into small groups is exactly how you kill a community. People want to feel like they're apart of a large group and that they can interact with everyone who shares that interest. It helps that community grow and by pushing them apart you're essentially forcing them to choose what tribe they want to join and inviting tribalism when in reality they're all the exact same people who we are dividing because we lack the technical capabilities to unite them.
You can be a member of as many Android communities as you want. You don't have to pick just one. The community isn't divided. They can even share 90% of the same people.
There is no harm in giving each instance a shot at running the best Android community. If all but one sucks, then that one will naturally be the one people stay subscribed to.
They can even share 90% of the same people.
why do these 2 communities exist if 90% of their users are exactly the same? this isn't a real scenario, this doesn't happen. everyone congregates to the biggest group.
I'm currently subscribed to gaming/games on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and kbin.social.
Each of those seems to be an active community.
If users from one choose to all congregate to one, that's fine. But if all three want to exist, that's great too.
Some people post, some people comment and some people lurk. Yes, 90% of posters across three communities probably doesn't make sense. But commenters? Lurkers? That's probably fine.
What you describe as the "issue" is the entire point of lemmy and decentralizing and all that.
once lemmy starts dictating "oh you have to change things in this community in this instance to match this instance" and "everything has to follow one master set of rules" they become reddit.
honestly the best way to solve your issue would just be multireddits, if you wanna see content from both communities just add it to a multilem or whatever they end up calling it.
Lemmy is a link aggregator. Decentralization is the opposite of how link aggregators work.
They are two different things.
It's like hangout spots. People congregate there. You can have a setup where everyone goes in to one place and from there they head to different rooms in that place and all rooms have their own rules and the place itself has its rules. If there's a single place, that's centralized. If there's a collection of those places each with their own set of rules and rooms, that's decentralized.
They each have their pros and cons (centralized makes it easier for people to find specific communities since they are all rooms in the same place, but means that you're SOL if you don't like the way that place is run), but both systems allow people (or links) to congregate.
its an internet forum, not a bar. you're here to talk about specific topics, and when you don't have enough people to do anything more than post memes or tech articles on 20 subs total, there isn't a reason to divide any specific community.
Respectfully disagree. For example, [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are three communities on similar topic with different mod teams, and the culture of each community is a bit different from each other.
So, for big event like this one:
https://lemmy.world/post/1442053
You can access multiple posts across different instances on the same topic with one click using the crosspost links on Lemmy so it's no less convenient than one megathread, and each post will have different conversations from each other, so it's easier on the individual mod teams for the respective communities as well.
Whereas on reddit this would have been a huge monolithic megathread and would be very hard to manage without a huge mod team.
That's the advantage of decentralization.
The entire point of link aggregators like reddit and the threadiverse is to centralize discussion and curation. These sites lose utility if you have many different places for the exact same content.
Then I'm not quite sure why you would expect centralization on an explicitly decentralized network of forums on the Fediverse.
i expect centralization in the way communities work, not in the way instances work. if you want to host a link aggregator, you're building a platform to centralize discussion and content, if lemmy does not work towards that goal of uniting communities across instances, it will fail because no one wants to join 20 small communities to get the same information 20 times over in their feed. this is antithetical to the utility of a link aggregator forum like reddit or digg, and that's what lemmy is trying to be.
Then would you like to go ask the good people at lemdro.id to close their Apple community and centralize it over here please?
It doesn't make sense to me to do so, but if you want it, more power to you mate.
i don't think you understand what centalizing communities but not the instances means. the communities need to exist within lemmy, not within the instance. tieing communities to instances means for a given community there are dozens of copies, none of witch are integrated unless the users use a crossposting feature that no one understands and doesn't make any sense from a moderation standpoint. users and communities need to be unattached to an instance so they can become less isolated from the people who want to be apart of that community but use a specific instance for whatever reason.
What you're asking for is fundamentally impossible within activitypub. You can't have something that's both acting like a hashtag and is moderated by it's "owners." It's better to just realize that certain cream will rise to the top in time and then fall down as it is poorly moderated. Not everybody federates with everybody else.
Would it be alright if a client app handled this logic? Where you can sort communities organize communities in a folder like interface to customize your "all" feed?
IMHO it would be better to allow to post to multiple groups at once.
At least with Jerboa this is not possible. And I often have links that I would like to discuss in different groups.
Disagreed. I hate cross posts because people just end up posting the link to every community they can convince themselves it's tangentially related to. If it's important enough to discuss in a different group, people can take the time to go post it manually.
Thank you admins, but it's only fair if c/android members are informed of this, as the current sticky notice there is, in the light of this thread, totally misleading as it gives the impression that 1- the community "officially" moved (not true, only one mod "officially" moved, but he wanted to also prevent those who didn't want to follow him from participating on [email protected] altogether) and 2- that it's permanently closed (not true, again in the light of this announcement). The current sticky is just false.
Current members must explicitly know that the community will reopen in a week (though I disagree that this "waiting period" is even necessary, since that moderator already forced more than one week on us) and that if they want to stay they just have to wait. This announcement needs to be a sticky thread in [email protected] too.
Thank you. A message will be posted soon in the Android community. Good catch to make sure everyone is informed.
Will the old group of moderators be removed and replaced?
The old mods have already left - the problem was that they locked the lemmy.world community behind them on the way out.
I know when this all started, there were some people who volunteered to reopen the community and mod it, and contacted the admin to that end. I assume this announcement is the resolution of that - when the additional week is up, the original lemmy.world community will reopen with the new mods.
So if the new community is still federated with lemmy.world, if they reopen this instance does that not make things overwrite each other or would they have to defederate themselves from lemmy.world?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. New to the fediverse and lemmy in general.
No - they're entirely separate.
Basically the way it works is that you never really leave the instance you're on. When you access a community hosted on that instance, you're of course on that instance. But when you access a community that's hosted on another instance, you're actially accessing a mirror of that community that's hosted on your own instance.
So for example, from your point of view, coming in through lemmy.world, the two entirely separate communities are [email protected] and [email protected]@lemmy.world. The first one is the lemmy.world community snd the second one is a local mirror of the entirely separate lemdro.id community.
Hope that makes sense ..
If they're not interested in moderating a community here then that's really the only solution.
I agree. They publicly declared their intent to abandon the community. Which it seems they have already done. There is no purpose in keeping them around as moderators if they no longer have any intent in moderating. The only logical conclusion is to find new mods.
Naw this place isnβt run by corporatist pig faced savages
I'm not sure what that means.
Can someone do a ELI5/outoftheloop type summary for me? Why did the mods leave? Where did they go?
The mods from r/Android started their own Lemmy instance called lemdro.id. Among the communities they opened was c/Android. There was already an Android community on Lemmy.world the was active with 15k+ subscribers.
The mods decided to merge with the communities and move over to lemdro.id in the hope to fight fragmentation. They locked the Lemmy.world instance to keep as an archive. And now we're here.
I'll add the post they made in bit.
The mods decided to merge with the communities and move over to lemdro.id in the hope to fight fragmentation.
I get the fragmentation thing, but it's Lemmy. Fragmentation is kind of the point. I think closing the community, while something the creators can freely choose to do (as long as the instance owner is okay with it), it's not a very democratic decision. Make the other instance better and give users the right to choose.
The reasonable solution. Understanding that locking it forever would be depriving this instance of a once active community that people have volunteered to mod, but respecting that the original point of that mod team doing so was to try and consolidate instead of creating a competing community.
My only concern now is that some of the people actively trying to escalate the whole situation into an attack on the previous mod team may be the ones running the place. I hope that isn't the case.