Do I understand correctly that I have to subscribe to 5 different NoStupidQuestions on 5 different instances?
The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn't the "copycats" get the "this community name has already been taken" message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
You don't have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅
For real, man. Homegrown tomatoes are fkn delicious.
If y'all aren't growing your own butter lettuce then you're missing out on one of the best things in life
Ever had dry farmed tomatoes? They’re like regular homegrown tomatoes but with twice the flavor.
What's dry farming? Limiting water supply?
Essentially no watering. Only works with places with some mild temps, a 20 inches of rain per year, and some morning fog etc.
https://agroecology.ucsc.edu/resources/publications/grower-guides/pdf-downloads/dry-farmed-tomatoes.pdf
Thanks for your reply. I haven't heard about this directly, but I have noticed that birds-eye-chilly plants(don't know if this is the right name for it) get chillies that are so much more eye-watering-throat-burning-ass-blastingly spicy in the summer than other seasons. It even seems to do better when it's NOT watered than when it is.
But then there would be my tomatoes and the ones at each of my local grocery stores. Am I supposed to go get some from everywhere to enjoy tomatoes?
It seems to me like there are 5 places the grocery store has tomatoes and and you need to check all 5 places before you know which place you should buy from. Then, maybe next time you're at the grocery store, a different spot will have the better tomatoes and there are also 3 other new tomato stands in the store.
I'm definitely grateful for lemmy or kbin or mastodon or wherever the fuck I am right now as a reddit replacement, but this shit is confusing and annoying
Sure, and if you choose the correct place in the grocery store to get your tomatoes, you have all the fixings for a nice pico de gallo or guacamole all in one place. But why don’t they ever have chips there? I know this has to connect somewhere ….. yeah
I think the idea is people coming from a grocery store where all the fruit and vegetables were centralized in a "produce" section and then going to a Farmers' Market and complaining that multiple stalls sell tomatoes and having to visit all of them to go tomato shopping.
At least that's what I'm getting from these comments. I'm new here too, and getting used to it, but I get a Farmers' Market vibe.
That's a good perspective. Thank you for that. I'll try to look at it like a farmer's market from now on
I go to two different grocery stores to get different vegetables because they have varying quality. For example, if I want tomatoes I go to store 1 and for onions I go to store 2. For carrots I go to either because they are fine at both.
So if two instances have tomato, onion, and carrot magazines/communities with similar quality patterns I might want to sub tomatoes at one, onions at the other, and carrots at both.
I just want an easier way to find all of the instances that have onions so I know what I might be missing at the local farmer's market. Or find out that a new farmer's market opened up!
What is a "better" onion? More variety, maybe? Onions come in two kinds for me (other than type) edible and not; not a lot of spectrum on onion quality for me I guess.
Just about any other fruit or vegetable I can accept the varying quality of produce but onions and potatoes are either firm and good or mushy and not for me.
Or I could be overthinking what was probably an arbitrarily pulled example for an explanatory analogy.
Fresh, not bruised, the size I like, in stock. Just better quality overall. Same with the tomatoes at the other store.
I have no idea why there is such a difference in quality consistently for those two vegetables, but it has been consistent for a couple of years.
Since the two stores are within 5 minutes of each other and there are other reasons to go to each (brands, deli, bakery,etc.) I split the vegetables while I'm at it.
Fair enough. I don't know that I've ever had a grocer with consistently bruised/rotted onions. I'll go ahead and put that in the plus column.
!tomatoes@lemmy.world
Cool! I'm not growing as many tomatoes this year as some years — we've gone in heavily for strawberries and herbs this spring, and potatoes this summer — but I've got a Brad's Atomic Grape and an Indigo Ruby starting to set fruit.
In this heat?! Masochist.
edit: or sadist, no judgement.
This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.
If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.
It isn't at all a new concept and I'm not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don't feel like you need.
Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.
Adding an edit as I've thought a bit more: I think it's important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are 'unlimited' options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.
This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.
I think it's lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you'd like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.
I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there's less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can't universally squat on a community name
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it's necessary to consider the part after the "@" to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There's no such thing as a community named "No Stupid Questions", with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
Very well said. Great call out.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.
They're different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you're not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
For the record I don't think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while
May be true, it doesn't hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.
Indeed, there's a viability threshold for a community, and it's probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn't doing any of them any favours.
But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey "Antenna" saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.
But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn't one of them.
I don't think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for "amalgamation" should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.
If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it's not, as a significant number of members won't want to amalgamate. And they shouldn't have to.
At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.
Yeah let's get to that million first before splitting everyone. It's really not helpful in the current state.
And there are actually options besides "this is how it currently works so it's good". Like some kind of federated communities/magazines where when you post to one it's posted to all of them. And I'm not saying it would be technically easy to implement, I have no idea, but I'm saying there are always room for improvement.
Near-identical communities/magazines with the same exact goal isn't practical.
I think a lot of users on Reddit (including some who gave migrated to kbin/Lemmy) haven't experienced a lot of the forum and IRC era of the internet.
As you've mentioned, "fractured" communities can actually be beneficial since each contribution is that much more valuable and nuances can actually exist between the similar communities. It allows things like the instance I'm on where I know I'm more likely to get a Canadian perspective in the communities on lemmy.ca versus other instances. To me that's a huge feature over centralized platforms where those nuances would get drowned out.
There is no "the community", though. These names don't "belong" to any one specific group of people, there's no "there can be only one" mandate.
As an example of why "there can be only one" is a bad thing, there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn't, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn't like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got "taken over" by right wing moderators and those who weren't of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community "Canada"?
You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the "real" community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.
But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It's not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it's an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.
There are feature requests in both Lemmy and Kbin's issue trackers for "multireddit"-like functionality, that might help when implemented.
It would help, but frankly I think there needs to be more - both because it would be helpful and because, up to this point, Lemmy is mostly following in Reddit's footsteps in terms of features.
Consider a "multipost" option, on top of the existing crosspost. Multiposting something to another community would push the post as-is (no edits allowed) there, then collate all comments across all communities it had been multiposted to into one comment section displayed on all of them. The original community each comment chain originated on could be marked on the parent comment, and child comments could automatically be routed so they originate from the parent community of the chain.
Just spitballing here, but something like this would help bridge the gap a lot more than just a multireddit port.
Those two spaces had differing stances.
There also the case of InterestingAsFuck as opposed to DamnThatsInteresting, because why the fuck does "Fuck" have to be in the title?
But then there's shameless karma-farming duplicates, like ComedyCemetery and ComedyNecromancy.
Starting up is always hard. Short of copying over a subreddit to a declared official new home (which did happen for a few), you have to build up from nothing. I think it's come a long way in only the last few weeks. I've already seen a post complimenting the response time and answers from a Lemmy community when the Reddit posts went ignored, and also I've seen one community owner realize that the other communities of similar names are doing much better and decide to close up. Another group decided the best solution was not to try and pull in other communities, but act as a general discussion that also served to link up the many specific niche communities distributed throughout Lemmy and Kbin. Lastly the attacks on .world and .ml serve as a reminder of the benefits of having duplicity. What if one of those had been a long-time established home of a community with millions of posts and got wiped from such a thing?
This is evolution in action, what works best will prevail, and part of that will be redundancy and adaptive ability.
It's a sticking point because it's new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn't a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That's why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there's a pretty significant chance you'll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities...which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.
Except for when those communities have names that aren't intuitive in any way, or the intuitively named communities are full of off-topic content.
I'm not going to say that reddit is the bastion of how to properly run a website. Clearly r/trees r/marijuana r/earthporn so on and so forth is super unintuitive, but until the concept of how the fediverse works becomes more common knowledge, we'll have to help new members along. It's taken me a little more than a week to even get remotely comfortable with how it works.
I only just learned today that I can't see content from users on instances like lemmygrad because the instance that I joined has it blocked. I didn't even really realize what I was doing at the time. Fortunately it's something I also would have done, but my point still stands that its not something that's immediately apparent or intuitive.
And you can't see content from Facebook on Reddit, or from Twitter on Instagram.
The part that's unintuitive is that you can see content from users on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
Even doing this for a month now I still forget that a lot and treat posts like Reddit posts. Being a Kbin user, I have to constantly stop myself from replying to questions about Lemmy and app suggestions for features that I already have thanks to script mods. And that's even with mods that highlight the post isn't from Kbin!
I think that magnifies the point I was trying to make as well. Not many people understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two separate "websites" in the same way that Facebook and Instagram are. They're both associated with Lemmy and there's no "Lemmy.com" per se.
For your own awareness, cross-posting is available on Lemmy.
Nice! Thanks for the info :)
It seems to just copy the text with an intro bit, though, which doesn't feel great.
This was really well said!!
I'm here from Reddit and that's what I've been doing, just subscribing to whatever I can find for each subreddit I'm losing, and then whichever one seems like it's either most active or has the most quality content stays and I unsub from whatever sublems aren't providing content.
This OP seems pissed off about subbing to multiple sublems that are the same but like....you don't have to. Go use Reddit? lol
The multiple sublems thing is kinda the point of Lemmy, there isn't one big overlord controlling everything
Cross instance communities or a way to stich these places together better needs to happen though. Splinter groups making their own community is fine, but there needs to be some main communities for things.
It's not just a make it more like reddit need. If lemmy.world decides to defederate like beehaw (or goes down), then all that content is gone from lots of other people, and the fediverse as a whole loses. If there exists a way to blend communities, then maybe people only notice less posts on memes rather than just an empty void.
It's also a huge discovery problem, some people are going to think there isn't an active NSQ community, and maybe try making yet another, because the didn't find the one active community. It's also possible that there's 5-10 small/tiny- communities that could become a single thriving community of they were able to actually discover and coordinate with each other.
Discovering new communities that share names and topics will be the biggest core improvement in my opinion. Like having a way for an instance to poll all federated instances for communities with the same name or with a name that includes a term to easily add would be awesome.
Then the ability to combine them into subsets of your siscriptions by whatever topic you want would be awesome. Like instead of subscriptions as a while you could have 'Tabletop Gaming' with various 40k, CAV, BattleTech, and other games grouped how you want or subgroups for each game.
No, just subscribe to the most active one.
Or three Incase that one goes down
no, subscribe to the ones that follow the same ethos as you do. larger is not always better
Did you consider the ethics and morals of every subreddit you subscribed to? I don't think the average user really cares about that.
No, not every. But for things like world news/memes/etc then yes the instance does play a part in what I have subscribed to
you fundamentally misunderstand lemmy. These are all independent communities, hosted by different admins.
Which is stupid.
Not really, it's just not Reddit
Of course you're welcome to that opinion but it's a fundamental design feature of the fediverse.
There's no central point of control. Anyone can create an instance and create their own "No stupid questions" community.
There are obvious benefits if you'd care to consider them but if not it's fine if the fediverse isn't for you. There's always reddit I guess.
There is nothing stopping the fediverse from checking with other instances to see if a name is already in use. That would be a pretty cool feature to avoid a whole bunch of duplication.
They're not duplicates. Remember /r/games and /r/gaming? Both with unique moderation styles? Well now they don't need different names.
Yup, this is just as easy If you notice one of the "nostupidquestions@fucknuts.com" communities is always posting edgy bullshit, you unsub and go on your way. No different than unsubing from "Actual" or "True" variants on reddit.
Yes there is.
It's decentralised. There's no central authority.
Even if lemmy imposed that restriction, you could just fork the code and remove it.
Wait, he's got a point though: Why not something like this:
A user wants to create a new community. He enters a name, then the system checks and informs that "the fediverse already has a community by that name +here and +here." The user may still create this same community on this instance - or he might say, hey cool thanks, and go subscribe to (one of?) the existing ones instead.
This would only help if people creating these communities were not aware that communities with the same name exist on other instances.
Even if this feature did discourage someone from creating a new community, some other fief lord would be along shortly to create it.
I did feel the same way about multiple communities initially, but now I've been here a while I realise that it's just not a problem - just subscribe to all of them, that's the solution.
Ah yes, just like how having multiple email providers is stupid. We should all just use Gmail as a the single source of truth! /s
And confusing
This is the same thing as having a community on Discord, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, except you get the feature of them seamlessly working together.
Now I'm wondering if we could create meta subs that we could subscribe too...
I think over time some instances and some admins will become more popular, and weed out the rest.
To some extent perhaps but I don't think that should be the objective.
Just subscribe to all the "no stupid questions" communities. It's no big thing.
New ones get created all the constantly. Are they supposed to spend all their time monitoring every instance for new variants of a community?
I mean, this is how everything worked already. People start subreddits and have to get traction, make their way to /r/all, etc. Having ~one single space~ wasn't magic, and things work exactly the same.
If you see a community that interests you, subscribe to it and be the change.
No u
It's fine.
As the philosopher Macho Man said "The cream rises to the top"
It'll take time but eventually everyone will merge into one major one unless some admin/mod shenanigans.
At least I think.
I actually think the fediverse is going to fracture very quickly. You're going to have instances that will defederate with anyone that permits the slightest bit of anti-trans commenting and you're going to have instances that will make 4chan look inclusive and will defederate from anyone posting "woke bullshit"
Ive posted on here before that its only a matter of time before someone like Volkswagen-Audi start their own instance so they can control the narrative and push their own content too.
And I can ABSOLUTELY see paid only instances for well moderated kid friendly content and also hardcore porn.
Yes, it will fracture, but hopefully at the fringes, as you mentioned. So thsie with extreme views find it difficult to get traction due to lack of users or lack of places to post.
It should mean that we don't get brigading from communities. You can just block them. It should.nean that there are safer communities but they miss out on some content.
At the moment, the only large communities are general. That may change over time. I do hope that companies start their own instances. Not to control the narrative, but to be their official communication. I don't want commercial users using the community instances.
Again, then, they can be blocked but also, they can be verified.
The issue as I see it is that once Meta or someone similar can start pointing to far right instances, child abuse materials or anything of the like and start painting Lemmy as a whole as the new 4chan "radicalising and grooming the children" only to release their "new app" which is just their instance then the "free fediverse" is going to BE the fringe.
Large companies will have no desire to be involved with "that place" because the sanitised, community guidelines having, data farming goliath will have 2 billion users. Why risk the bad pr?
Why risk the bad PR of being on meta when you can be on your own instance that any other instance can access.
It's like email. People don't hold Google responsible if someone emails them with profanity.
I expect there will be sanitised versions and free for all versions. Moderation will differentiate but it may be that it's send regulated, like porn on NSFW instances.
One thing I've noticed is that I've blocked the NSFW instance from my feed and any comments from there are blocked too. So users from instances with a lot of NSFW content may find they have less engagement. L it may be that more regulated instances have less freedom of speech but more people to listen.
Likely the realiry will be somewhere in the middle.
I think you have a very optimistic outlook on people. We understand how the fediverse works but I wouldnt trust most people to differentiate between the app and the content it serves.
Perhaps, once legal consequences of comments start kicking in here and there, the Fediverse will tend to remain fragmented to avoid having very large communities that also happen to act as a lightning rod for litigation
Why would they face any legal consequences any more than any other social media? The platform would not be liable for the content of its users. Obviously, they are responsible to remove illegal content, like child porn.
Not more, necessarily, but definitely more exposed as smaller servers won't have legal and regulatory compliance teams supporting them
Instance location. Content comes at you from all over the Fediverse but once its in your instance it's actually located on your server. It's obvious how even regular NSFW stuff can be a problem if your instance is sitting in a ME country but perhaps less obvious (and more troublesome) is text based content.
For instance if a user is enrolled on an instance located in Germany and then subscribes to Neo-Nazi content from an instance located in the United States. That NN material is now on your instance but much of it is probably illegal in Germany. What happens when the German Authorities find out and come knocking?
Even "Child Porn" isn't nearly as cut and dried as most people think. Things like /c/tinytitties or /c/flatchested from lemmynsfw are arguably illegal in a place like Australia since the person can be perceived as under-age due to their physical characteristics. It gets worse when you toss in the AI Generated stuff.
Big Tech does a lot of juggling trying to stay clear of these problems and they have large legal teams to help them when they run into trouble. I rather doubt that most instance admins have the resources for it.
I run this instance for loggers
This. For now, what I do is join the ones that seem to have momentum with active posting. Eventually one will be dominant and I'll drop the dead ones.
Everyone's going to say No, and "just subscribe to the most active one", but if you're a 'Fediverse completionist' and want to ensure that there's not a single thing you miss anywhere at any time, then the answer is Yes.
Fomo isn't real, it can't hurt you.
Correct. Ultimately it's up to each person how much they want to extend themselves into the Fediverse. You really can't follow everything everywhere all the time, so you need to pick what you want your feed to consist of.
I've subscribed to any redundant tech / IT security related communities no matter how many of them there are, because I always want to stay current on any news that could impact the network environment I manage.
On the other hand, I like seeing some memes, but memes@lemmy.ml will absolutely flood your front page if you subscribe to it, so I stick to a few smaller meme subs like starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, risa@startrek.website, and lotrmemes@midwest.social.
I hate to tell you this but fears can absolutely hurt us.
Good thing I play any%.
It would be cool if from your subscribed communities, Lemmy would let you group the ones that are the same but are on different instances.
So if the same article is posted on two or more of the grouped communities, then it would merge the comment sections into one.
Or just drop the dupes. There are so many bots posting the same link to almost-the-same communities with no comments.
No. You don't have to. But if you want to throw a wide net and not just wind up with a singular place with a unified mentality, it's good to have multiple places focused on the same topic. For perspective.
Ask yourself if you subscribed to /r/tech or /r/technology or both or neither (or /r/pics, /r/pic etc., whatever you jam is) and you will have your answer.
A community name is just an address, both on Lemmy and on Reddit. It never mean that that address had the exclusive rights to a topic.
Yeah, this actually happens on Reddit a fair amount. Off the top of my head, there's /r/tearsofthekingdom and /r/totk which both have 100,000+ subs, and /r/nsfw_gif and /r/nsfw_gifs that have millions of subs.
EDIT: There's also /r/gaming and /r/games which was a notable early community split when people started complaining that /r/gaming had too many low-effort memes.
If I send an email to support@microsoft.com, it should be copied to support@gmail.com because it is the same thing, right?
Lemmy isn’t Reddit. It has similar capabilities, but it is fundamentally different. Think email or web hosting, not one stop shop.
I see your point but this is not a valid analogy
Choosing different communities with the stated purpose is all about context: the policies of the mods, the policies of the admins, and the reputation of the instance. Yes, it isn't a perfect analogy, but people need to shift how the think about the Lemmy/Kbin model from how they think about Reddit, and the example that seems to connect most easily with users is e-mail. Maybe a more subtle / apt analogy would be
!cool_game@lemmy.worldhas an obviously different context and significantly different content than!cool_game@coolgamedev.com, but the same stated purpose (and community name).The problem is that it isn't just the users who are confused about this: Lemmy admins seem to each have the goal of being "the place to be", and Kbin goes out of its way to devalue off-instance content. I personally think (primarily) user instances should be separate from (primarily) content instances, but that would take a coordinated effort by the admins. We are starting to see some grass roots efforts at making that happen, though the actions of the admins may prevent that from taking hold.
So? Reddit has about 10 sizeable Subs that are just a variation of "Ask Any and All Questions". That's not even counting speciality subs like "MedicalQuestions" or "ITQuestions" or "DermatologyQuestions" or "AskTrangender". Or the different language ones like "FragReddit" (German). In the end 1-3 will become the major ones, all will be a bit different and everyone will find the ones they like most.
You have stepped through the Looking Glass, Alice. Welcome to the
MultiFediverse.Begin at the beginning, then continue until you reach the end. Then, stop.
I mean, are you really that concerned that you might miss some random question on one of the less popular ones?
I'm going to guess yes
It’s an example. If there are multiple instances of a thing do I need to subscribe to all of them? The answer is yes. It’s different from Reddit but there are pro and cons.
The answer is no. You don't NEED to subscribe to all of them. If you want to make absolutely sure you don't miss a single thing everyone says on that topic, then maybe you do. But if you are just interested in electric cars, you can just pick the most active one of the one with the most subscribers. Even on reddit there were both /r/electriccars and /r/electricvehicles.
While I agree with what you're saying in terms of seeing posts, the flip side is wanting to make a post visible to as many users are possible gets tougher.
Say I have a problem with my MicroSonySonic MPZoomPod that's driving me crazy to figure out, so I figure I'll post on Lemmy about it and see if anyone else has had that problem and a solution. In the reddit days, I just go to /r/MPZOOMPOD, or I google for "reddit mpzoompod" and find the subreddit. I can now post there knowing I'm hitting the entire community of mpzoompod users, or at least the majority of them. To do that on Lemmy, though, I now have to wonder if instead of a single community with 120k users, I have 12 communities with 10k users. So either I post to a tiny fraction of the communty, and thus have a much lower chance of getting my question answered, or I post the same thing to 12 different communites and have 12 different threads to keep track of for replies.
Obviously this is simplified, cause more likely there will be on big community somewhere, a couple other smaller versions, and then probably a couple completely devoid of posts from when people were first migrating to Lemmy and were excited to start communities.
Anyway, that was kind of a lot, but I think it really comes down to the subject matter. I don't need 5 versions of showerthoughts, and I don't care if showerthoughts has 1k subscribers or 1m subscribers, but if I really wanted showerthoughts to grow in popularity, the more people using one copy the better. Alternatively,it would be rad if /c/googlepixel or whatever wasn't fragmented so I could know I was looking at the most likely source of information.
It's all kind of an interesting thing to think about, and I can't decide just yet which way I'd personally prefer. I remember reddit before all the digg people piled in, and I liked how it felt more like a community back then, but I also can't disregard how incredible reddit has been in recent times for finding answers to specific questions, or getting news, or finding fans of a particular subject just because it became the default website to look for that stuff.
You don't have to if you don't want to. Subscribe to the one you like best, and help grow that one.
Personally, I find myself only subscribing to and browsing communities on the local instance. The idea of the Fediverse is cool and all, but it's just way too much information for one person to process.
This where I’m at. I’ve given up on any content that isn’t on Lemmy.world
Federation is honestly a lot more trouble than it’s worth and I wish a different system had been implemented. Unfortunately it’s too late to change that.
Some of these duplicate communities are just placeholders. But sometimes, the differences are obvious, where one community Is populated by jerks or modded by power-trippers.
Over time, the more popular community will become clear by the number of subscribers. (Or the real, topical one will give itself a different name to avoid confusion with the jerks).
Just subscribe to the most active one, just like with copycats on Reddit.
They don’t get the message that a similar community already exists because they are on separate instances. Due to defederation, it’s possible that not all of those communities will be visible from all other instances. This is one reason why it’s useful to have the same community across multiple instances.
There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.
You don't have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.
A client that aggregated like communities would be nice.
I'm waiting for the apps to iron out the basics and then they'll do it I'm sure.
Only if it's configurable. It would be trivial for bad actors to find a niche sub, make a copycat of it on another instance, and start posting spam etc.
We call that Reddit
I think there will probably be a natural selection of which one prevails. But each instances may have different rules and different mods. So follow and unfollow the few that have what you like. It would be nice in the future though to ability to create aggregate subs or find aggregate subs like a multi-subreddit for a given topic.
Should've missed the one in dbzer0. :D
For now yes, but over time probably no. Multiple communities around the same subject are created on different instances. They'll compete to become the most active one. Then everyone will subscribe to that one, and it will grow even more. However, if over time you don't like that one any more (e.g. don't agree with the mods) you can start a community with the same name somewhere else and compete again to become the most active one (or not, and stay small if that is preferred).
the whole fediverse requires a more effort on your part than reddit ever did. i hate reddit now and left permanently, but i know that the fediverse will never be able to replace reddit and reddit will continue to flourish.
FB and Twitter were flourishing for over a decade with me never being a part of it. I'm okay with Reddit flourishing without me, I'm happy where I am right now.
i wish i could say the same about being happy here; i find myself missing the subs i use to visit and it's only after moving away from reddit have i started to realize how ultra niche those subs are.
however i've been wanting to spend less time with a screen in my face and the recent reddit assholery coupled w the lack of content from the fediverse is going to force me to make that change in my life and i see it as a good thing.
I still go back and forth. I use Red Reader, a third party app that still works. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, especially if there are niche communities that are really important to you.
Honestly though, every day the content on Reddit gets worse and more repetitive and the general atmosphere gets more sour. We'll see how things pan out, but imo the vibe on Lemmy is more pleasant atm.
i think i'm lucky in that all of my niche subs were porn adjacent, so i need them like i need another hole in my head.
still, i find myself visiting reddit too, but without the ability to log in to limit my interaction with them.
I miss some niche subreddits but in general I appreciate the digital detox it forced upon me. I can live without these niche communities. It's not like they provided me with much more than fun trivia or memes on topics I already dabble in either way.
the content from those niche subs is next to impossible to find on my own so i don't get to dabble anymore; but i saw losing it as a digital detox too.
100% this
I don’t want to have to curate every part of my feed. I find myself missing r/All constantly while browsing the local pages.
There’s too many responsibilities on the user, which for some people is a huge plus, but for the average consumer is a huge drawback stopping them from joining a new platform.
No, you choose which ones the best for you.
Such as the most populated, most active, or most secluded if that's what you like. It's a good thing OP, we are not locked down to one community in the event that one goes crazy.
Just let it settle organically.
I have been subscribing to the one with the highest population. Maybe that's a stupid approach, but I'm a stupid person, so it's working for me atm.
If it's stupid and it works then maybe it's not stupid.
If there's sufficient content that you like in the one with the highest population for your tastes then problem solved.
can you subscribe to all of them? yes. do you have to? No. Lemmy is still new, overtime people will gravitate to particular ones and the others will wither away
But muh FOMO!
Pretty much, but i I think as the apps and front ends mature, we’ll be able to set up personal “multireddits.” I don’t mind signing up for the multiple communities because I understand why or is that way. However, do think the instances are forming more from simple load distribution and less from the types of deep seated shared interests that may have been predicted. The result is that there are more communities than expected that might benefit from being "collated", but that will be a pretty personal decision.
Why would you think that?
isn't activitypub stuff basically open?
so you could create or comission your own platform/ interface that can synthesize posts from all sorts of places and could even do things about duplicates?
thats the benefir of the open source data model and apis - someone can probabledevlop the features you want - eventually.
the current platforms probably all look a bit like pre existing forums / aggregators or social media . butthats just a starting pont, the future could be much weirder ways of compiling displaying and creating posts. and in theory it can all interoprate (within reason, and outwith federation blocks)
i probably have no idea what i'm talking about though . . . i've certainly not even queried a single activitypub api personally
Can we get some multicommunities that can include some of most active for a given community across whichever instance they're in that can be subscribed to at once?
Or does that feature exist already and I just don't know about it? There were multireddits before. Not quite the same use case, but similar concept.
You don't have to. You can. You can also only subscribe to one of them. Did you subscribe to every single subreddit covering a specific or non specific topic? Is it an issue that you get content from ~4 different communities / magazines of similar content? Why make it harder than it is?
If you want them all I guess.
Its a downside but also a power.
For example, if No Stupid Questions@kbin.social tomorrow decides to add a rule "No Post about cats" there are still others you can subscribe to that won't have that rule
And if you don't want posts about cats, you can unsubscribe from the ones that do!
You will never see everything anyway, might as well narrow down to what you are interested in.
No, you don't have to subscribe to any of them, much less all of them.
There's gong to be multiples with a given name because they each exist on their own instance. Instances are mini reddits that can talk to each other, not the same site.
You want redundancy, it's one of the biggest benefits of federation and decentralization.
You can, but eventually most people will likely congregate in the 1-2 most active ones.
Nope, you don't have to subscribe to any of them actually. Look, I'm not subbed to either nsq and I'm good.
Just subscribe to everything what's the problem?
The only issue of any substance is that I often like to browse a particular community. It would be nice to get some front-end interface solution that makes it reasonable to do so for multiple communities. I’m happy to set it up manually once, but it would be tedious to check in on, say, the mechanical keyboard communities on 5 different instances every day.
For my main feed, a shotgun approach is absolutely fine, and I wouldn’t want to weaken the benefits of federation by herding everyone into a single instance per “interest.”
I do think that maybe the Lemmy developers were expecting each instance to have a more distinct character than is happening so far, at least on average. Federation in the threadiverse seems to be acting more like simple distribution, load balancing, and decentralization, rather than digital tourism defaulting to open borders.
We should have an option to merge communities in 1 single feed or something. Or maybe a grouping function, where we could name the group, and any communities under that group would show as a single group. Then other people could like your group and also subscribe etc. But that way maybe things could get complicated. I mean for the average Joe it will already be difficult IMO to make the effort to understand the Fediverse. I mean I took my time to understand it and start using it, cause I was lazy and had Reddit. I guess there are no perfect solutions, there's always dissadvantages. For sure 1 thing that is attactive with centralized systems is the peace of mind when it comes to understanding it, because it's simple etc. Like starting using Crypto vs using a bank account and so on. Oh I'm rambling already.
This seems to be a pretty popular thought, both in this thread and many others discussing Lemmy. I'd put real money down that the 3rd party apps will get this going, but for actually using the website on a PC, I'm imagining it'd be up to the devs/admins of whatever Lemmy instance you're using.
There are multiple communities because these are all different servers, which don't coordinate community names with each other.
There are some feature proposals on the lemny issue tracker that try to address this issue in different ways...
You dont have to, but thats the most obvious thing to do if you enjoy that kind of content.
I'm only subscribed to the most active one, I don't like it and I wish if it was possible to merge and migrate communities
Maybe we can federate the communities on our federated instances 🤔
I don't understand why some people have an issue with this but maybe is due to the way I have browsed Reddit for years, do with Mastodon now and plan to keep doing with Lemmy though I still haven't finished setting it up. I like having different "home pages", much like in Mastodon I can browse my following feed, the instance feed and the federated feed depending on the kind of content I want to look at that moment. Or all of them in succession if I want to check it all. When I was in Twitter I had to use lists to resemble something like this.
Reddit was even better for this if you took the time to set it up: if you suscribed to every single thing that caught your attention no matter your level of interest in it your suscribed feed ended up being clogged by the most popular subreddits among your suscribed communities, so you wound up missing out on some interesting posts in your more niche, slow communities. My solution was to only suscribe to the smallest communities where I didn't want to miss a single one of the posts (for example staples like GameDeals or some other minor communities I was temporarily fixated into, like say a specific videogame or themed subreddit -I unsuscribed from those when I got tired of them). Then, slowly and naturally while I browse keep heavily heavily curating the general feed by using the filter/block function, getting rid of anything that didn't interest me or wasn't good for me (in whatever way you want to interpret it, for example filtering ragebait subs) or often innocuous big subs I was tired of seeing or whose whole shtick had grown old. The result was a smaller suscribed feed I could quickly check daily with the reassurance that I wouldn't miss out on anything from those communities and a general feed that was always interesting to me but with the potential to show any kind of new community for me to decide to keep or filter away.
Subscribe to all of them and enjoy.
For real? I didn't know this is how it worked. I don't even know how to find those other instances. Do they just come up automagically or do you have to specifically search under those other instances?
This is bad.
Not bad, different :)
Just search under community: https://lemmy.world/search?q=nostupidquestions&type=Communities
Federation works a little differently. Having said that, it's not too far from reddit either. For example on reddit, as a basketball fan, I visit r/nba often. But then there are also other subs like r/nbadiscussion, r/nbatalk, and other subs that have overlapping content as r/nba. That's the same case here, except they are on different instances rather than subreddits. You can do the same as what you do on reddit and subscribe to the most popular instance community and that's it. Eventually as time goes by, the most popular community will become the "default" so you won't really miss out on content. If you really have FOMO, then subscribe to all of them; same as what you would do on reddit; but obviously you don't do that right?
"That's the way of the world" is usually said by Ayn Rand types who don't care about anyone else or know how to make things better.
Also, they paint the questioner as some nutter obsessed with finding every single byte about a topic.
And, no one is "stuck" on anything, we notice a defect and want to find a solution.
So think about this. Suppose you're making a community for, say, Ukrainians who have taken refuge in the USA.
What kind of person shrugs off their need to find each other and says "Suck it up buttercup". Or makes fun of them for asking.
Yes, there are inconvenient and irritating ways of handling the problem. Shrugging it off just tells me what kind of person you are, but it doesn't improve anything.
Now, what we could do - crazy, I know, hear me out - is think of a way to conglomerate all the content from diverse instances with different policies into one community where anyone can hear everyone else.
Two kinds of people in this world. The ones who start asking mocking questions, and those who put their heads together.
It's not like there is absolutely no solution. There are a lot of tools for finding Lemmy communities right now. You could go to one of these tools and search for Ukraine and get a list of communities.
Subscribing to all of them is effectively making a conglomerate of their content in your home feed. I don't see anything wrong with this approach. Other than that things will naturally work themselves out over time as people tend towards a single community.
You calling me Ayn Rand for saying that we should not hand over all power to a single corporation and then in the same breath also suggesting conglomerating all instances into one is... a bit absurd in my opinion. I am also going to choose to overlook you trying to link having the option to click 'subscribe' three times to the plight of Ukrainian refugees.
I do apologize if it seems I'm "mocking" anyone. Clearly that is not my intention - especially on 'No Stupid Questions'. Try not to become so defensive here, we're just having a conversation.
You asked and I shared my response.
Best of luck.
I don't think auto-combining similar named communities is a viable solution, except in the case of users doing it themselves (e.g. multireddits or whatever).
Different communities, even with the "same name" (technically not possible because the @domain is part of the name), will have different vibes based on who participates, who moderates, what instances they're on, etc. Mashing all of those together would at minimum, be a bad user experience and at worst, invite tons of harassment from 'troll' communities.
The process you are going through now is how things get “better”.
Right now there a a multitude of communities across multiple instances that all superficially appear to be the same thing; if you must have ready access to all of it in your feed then yes you will need to subscribe to all of them.
The reality is that these places are not all the same. Not everyone is going to want to join all of them and they will be subject to different moderation. There will be different levels of activity and on the whole different vibes.
Over time, some will diverge, some will diminish and some will close and direct you to post elsewhere.
If you’re comparing to Reddit - that is a place where a lot of this has already happened; for mainstream subjects one sub became dominant but it’s worth bearing in mind that for some niche subjects there would still be a handful to subscribe to for a fuller picture.
It’ll happen here too; over time things will evolve and settle into a pattern.
As for the caring part - caring comes across in how we choose to interact with each other on here; the way we do that will strongly influence the way these communities grow and change over time.
So. We can influence how things will be. No individual person or entity will ever be in complete control. So it goes.
Edit: Also, the communities search tool on Lemmy.World reveals more communities with the same name: https://lemmy.world/search?q=nostupidquestions&type=Communities
And the ones asking bad faith questions, acting willfully obtuse over completely trivial bullshit non issues.
I think you've lost some perspective here. You asked a simple question, and people explained how it works.
Do you want to group all the communities together? Take it up with the W3C Social Web Working Group, who own the standard for ActivityPub. It's a group of people, make your concerns known and maybe they'll agree with you and change it. I don't think they will, because I don't agree that this is a problem that needs to be solved, but I'm not part of that group, so I guess that doesn't matter.
In the meantime, why are you reacting like this to the helpful people who answered your question?
Why would you have to do that? I doubt you read every post on the Reddit subreddit, so you don't have to try to read every one here.
I mean you can, but there are instances I don't want to be federated with because of some of the content they host (which is moot for this discussion and I'm not thinking enough into whether they're any of these four). In those cases, I wouldn't want to subscribe to those specific communities. Kind of a guilt by association thing. Shitty, but it's how the system works.
no