Federation is pretty cool
I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn't federating new posts.
But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.
I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I'll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!
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On one hand, yeah, federation is cool. On the other, I've already seen two @Technology communities on two different instances, and I can see this issue becoming even worse.
A good solution would be to have some mechanism of merging same-named communities of multiple instances. But, alas, nothing like that afaik
I think you guys are entirely missing the point of a decentralized community and want to make it centralized. You come to lemmy with the expectation that it is something else, and when finding that it has some differences, you want to change it to fit your view. Come with an open mind and see the strong points. Because what you get is much more than what you miss.
Having two (or even more) communities/subs for the same topic is a feature. I understand that you think that having the community split in 2 might not be ideal, but that is the price to be paid for decentralization. And decentralization is the way to go. If one actor stars misbehaving, we easily have alternatives. One community starts being too draconian? Go to the other one. Start a new one. One community goes down due to too much bandwidth? You have the other one. Decentralization is so so good. I suggest watching some videos on the topic. You will grow to love it.
Now, the 2 technology communities: Pick both if you want. Interact with them, in different ways. Don't spam of course. But it will sort itself out. One of the communities will prevail as the bigger one and the other as the smaller. See it as a sort of evolution of communities.
Merging the communities would be wrong. That would defeat the purpose of decentralization! What could be done, is some sort of "tagging" for easier subscribing. If both of these communities were tagged as "technology", than you could subscribe to the tag "technology" and it would subscribe to both subs. Just some UX thing. But they need to remain 2 separate subs!
Fully merging them, sure, bad Idea.
Having way to browse both at the same time, though? Basically, some sort of a multi-community system that lets me see posts from both communities easily, and post to both (or selected few) at the same time.
Posts could even be "merged" by the hash of the content, so that there are no visible duplicates.
That'd be a pretty cool feature. Sounds like it could be a front end "fix" too
It would be a nice feature to be able to group communities into feeds.
Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there's also a "r/tech" and (at some point) there was a "r/technologynews" subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I'm sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.
Yes, but the problem is that your analogy isn't a 1-2-1 comparison. You are correct that at reddit we had r/tech, r/technology, r/technews, etc etc etc, but on lemmy, ALL OF THOSE can be named "Technology" with exactly the same spelling. So, when I'm trying to refer someone to a "specific" Technology, I also have to include the server. A conversation may go, "Hey WooChoo, you gotta check out the posts over on Lemmy. They have the best Technology content on the internet" Then you go to some rando "Technology" on a new lemmy server and you don't see any posts. What are the chances that you come back to me and say, "Hey Debo, remember that referral you gave me 6 weeks ago when we were talking? I went there and there wasn't any users." "Oh, sorry WooChoo, I forgot that you have to go to "THIS SPECIFIC SERVER of Technology" and then you're in a federation conversation when you were just trying to share a hot tip.
But on Lemmy you can also give your comm a name (and change it later), so you can have /c/technology on multiple instances and each may have a different name indicating its purpose.
Yes, and this is part of the problem. The great thing about an aggregation site is that it's a collective place for ALL posts about a single topic, say /r/Technology. With Lemmy, you might have DOZENS of /c/technology communities and for you to get the VALUE of the MASS of users, you'd need to subscribe to them all. This is a significant barrier to mass adoption as "my wife" won't be bothered to go out to many servers and subscribe to many communities just to get a reasonable flow of content.
I don't think it will be as much of a big deal as people think. Before the major aggregate sites, there's been web forums. Nobody had a problem with it, even novices users.
Second, it's not like it wasn't happening on Reddit anyway. For example there was r/askscience and r/sciencediscussion. Splinter subreddits were very common, and you might want to sub to 3 or 4 to keep up just with one topic.
It may actually be a good thing, because similar looking places may have a different feel/scope.
I mean, on Lemmy you can also specify a display name, i.e. a short description right on the home screen.
Finally, it tends sort itself on its own. I've already seen one example where 4 communities with the same name popped op, and after one ran away with popularity, another one shut down and the last two just link to the now "main" one. I suspect it will often be the case that just one or a small handful will grow to be major, and the rest will wither off.
Let's wait a bit, these are just the super early days remember.
I think you're totally right! That's partially why I said it's a bigger problem on Lemmy. Tools like browse.feddit.de will be pretty important; it'd be great if they were placed prominently somewhere.
I didn’t even know browse.feddit.de existed until you posted it!!! Hot tip right there. :)