Is it a good thing if there are identical communities on different instances?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 45 points – 1 years ago

Is it worthwhile to try to get mods to combine them? It just seems like a bit of a waste when trying to grow a community and its split in two.

Or is this what the fediverse is supposed to look like?

I read before somebody said that we might be able to combine similar communities at some point but don't know if that's true.

We need a feature to combine several communities into a group that we can follow in our subscriptions.

Then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

See this feature request on Github.

My suggestion on GitHub was to let instance admin create a local /g/ grouping, with the freedom in how they utilise a /g/ group.

Some people argued that they should be able to make it per account, like a multireddit, but the point was for new and general users having easier access to broader fediverse content.

The instance admin would only need to do some legwork at first, then they could add to it as they go along. The barrier of entry for new users finding which communities outside of their instance is substantial.

Idk if it needs to be a server side thing or if it could be client-side

Yeah. I think this is a good solution. It's then up to the user to decide if they want to combine or not.

What would be the difference then between subscribing to, say, 10 different communities separately, or a group of 10 communities?

If there are 5 different instances with the same community, to subscribe to all of them you have to go find them all.

If kbin had a feature to combine them in groups like this, when you went to subscribe to one version of the community, it could let you subscribe to all of them at once. Without having to hunt them down.

this gets asked a lot. Yes, the whole point of this platform is to be decentralized. Nothing stops you, or anyone, from following 5 different communities on the same topic. The advantages are many. Basically each instance will be able to mod with/apply different rules to their communities, they will attract different crowds (even if they overlap a lot) and they will have a different style. If one goes down, which is likely in these platforms, or if say an instance cannot be sustained anymore, or if one of the instances defederates your instance, or whatever- not all is lost. You still have all the other communities to follow.

there is a popular saying that goes, ''don't put all your eggs in the same basket''.

Apologies if this is a repeat question. I'm not entirely sure if there is a way to search in Jerboa for similar posts but I don't think there.

oh I didn't mean it that way, no need to apologize. I just notice this question comes up a lot inside different communities, people often wonder why there are also two/three/N other communities and why don't they all merge. It highlights a lot of people still expect things to be centralized even in a decentralized space. But, it's good that you ask, so hopefully more people understand better why it's good thing to avoid monopolies on topics.

The search function should function the same way as the search function on the official web interface. That means however, unless you're searching the url of a specific community, it can only search for communities, comments and posts on instances it has cached. If it hasn't had a member visit a community at least once, it won't know it exists.

I recommend browse.feddit.de to search for communities, and for newly created communities, you can search through the posts in !newcommunities@lemmy.world

There are many other places to look, you can find multiple lists of communities that migrated from Reddit with a quick google search.

Just saw that some apps do have a search function already. I've been using Jerboa and it doesn't have one yet (for posts/comments that is).

Thanks

I don't think so. I mean, even if an instance with an important community has a problem (e.g. goes offline) we can simply create that community on another instance, but as long as there are no problems I think it's better to have just one community.

Combining them doesn't make sense to me. There are situations where there are two big communities from two big instances with the exact same name(ie. c/reddit), but the content and the mod approach(rules etc.) aren't the same.

So, I think it's a good thing. You're interested in discussing a topic but don't feel comfortable on the community you found? You can just go find the same topic on another instance!

I would say merging them doesn't make much sense, but combining them (via some multi-sub entity a user can subscribe to) would be a nice way to organise and browse/filter your subscriptions.

Question: How many posts do you view from a given subreddit in a day?

How many comments on any given post do you read?

How many people need to be in a community to generate that many posts and comments? Because communities don't really need to be any bigger than that.

Having FOMO over what's going on in other communities is normal, but it's not helpful or useful. It's not like you weren't missing out on 99.9% of posts on big subreddits, or 99.9999999% of comments. And let's not pretend like what floats to the top in large subs is the best content. Popularity contests are not meritocracies.

Having 1000 communities on the same topic with 1000 active users each is better than having 1 community with 1,000,000 active users. Those users are easier to moderate, they're more likely to see other community members as people, and they're more likely to have their posts and comments viewed and interacted with by others.

And if something really interesting is happening in another one, someone will link to it.

On top of all that, consider the context of different communities. !politics on lemmy.ca is probably going to be a very different space than on, say, murica.fuckyeah. !games is going to me a differernt things on pathfinder.social than it will on startrek.website.

Imagining that spaces with big numbers are being shattered into small clones is not the right lens to look at this from.

I think it's a good thing to have more than one community devoted to a topic. I have already discovered that I don't like this or that community on this or that instance but I like another community on another instance dedicated to the same or similar topic. People have different styles and preferences even though they have similar subjects in common. It's like having different supermarkets or clothing stores. Some like to get their jeans at The Gap. Others prefer Levi's. Giving users more choices is good in my experience. It used to be this way in the days of forums and usenet news groups. I think if you're not used to it you will get used to it. It's like shopping around for a good class at college or looking for the right pair of jeans that fits you the right way.

I've been thinking about this. There are many up voted clickbait/ragebait articles on some of the popular news communities. I was considering creating a new community with specific rules about the quality of sources and non editorial titles instead of solely relying on votes. Please let me know if this already exists.

Edit: !news@beehaw.org seems to be exactly what I was after

I think that at the moment many communities are too fragmented. A lot of them seem to be a single person. There is a sweet spot regarding size, and that number is different from community to community. I wish people would avoid making duplicates if they didn't have at least one other person ready to join them though.

I think so, I've found out quickly that the instance can add a lot of context as the instance tends to be the primary setter of the overall theme or topic, and the communities are just where they intersect. It will be interesting to see which ones get popular and which ones don't.

That's exactly what happened with reddit, I think it's better to have more than one, worst case scenario you only sub to one and if it goes down there's a quick alternative.

Personally I sub to both and if an article repeats no big deal I just move on

I think the type of communities you want to see affects how you look at the repetition aspect.

I like to use the sports communities for news/discussion around the time an event is taking place. Following live speedy discussion doesn't quite work as seamlessly on two different communities. You just kind of end up picking one community and post there.

Yes, it's a great thing.

In the old days of forums there were multiple forums for popular topics, so if you didn't like one or didn't agree with how it was moderated you had many more to choose from. It was usually friendly and you got to know all the regulars in a forum.

Next we had centralisation which lead to massive forums, resentment built up against moderators, everyone was faceless and had no sense of community, and it all basically turned in to a competition for attention.

Now we have decentralisation, we can have lots of manageable size communities again - it's great.

@Mane25 Yeah, but it's the pits for the smaller communities I used to use reddit for. The local-ish one had at most 300 people online at a time and most of them were lurkers. Split that into smaller groups and there isn't enough critical mass in any one smaller group to make the communities work.

@FlayOtters

It wasn't a problem for forums, for smaller interests there'll be fewer forums, it'll sort itself out.

I thought about that too, but I also can see a scenario where as the userbase grows, one instance's community is seen as the "default". I suppose the upside is that if something happens to one instance, there will be a backup of sorts on another instance - which in a way is sort one of the points of decentralisation.

Yes, that's a risk, but it also gives communities the opportunity to migrate to a new server in case they get captured by hostile mods.

For example, my government will have presidential elections next year, and it's trying very hard to preemptively co-opt the corresponding subreddit with propaganda. If the sub had joined the protests and their mods removed, today it would likely be captured by government people. That won't stop them, for example, from trying to offer money to some mods in exchange for preferential treatment, or even mod privileges, but here the competition means they won't control the sole community with the country name.

I've found that similar communities on different instances can have VERY different experiences in terms of the community and attitude. I know I'm generalizing, but I feel a lot of Lemmy.world instances are more negative and hostile than similar instances on beehaw.org. Personally, I'd rather they stay separate. That way I can be more precise on dialing in the experience I want.

For me it doesn't matter. I subscribe to all the communities that interest me, no matter which instance they are on.

This is how it is supposed to work, yes. However. i will say one suggestion going forward might be some sort of voluntary community sub-federating. The idea is that communities from different instances that are considered similar in topic enough to be under the same umbrella would federate or group with each other. A person who subscribes to one might see content from other communities that have voluntarily opted into this feature. It would connect the scattered communities of topics while also allowing these communities to "defederate" on their own from other communities of the same topic, in the event that malicious communities attempt to joing where they do not belong.

This could also be given to the user, the ability for users to group their own subscriptions together, but this would put way more work on the end user and may not be as intuitive.

For example, I am subscribed to one Silent Hill community, and I think I am the only member beside the mod, with no posts. It would be nice if I could see content from other Silent Hill communities in that feed.

As long as there is a way to spin up a new community if the mods go rogue, I'm okay with it.

I think that'll always be the case with the Fediverse.

They can already be seen in tandem with each other. If anything, it just gives more content for the same topics. I really don't know what purpose consolidation would ultimately serve.