- cross-posted to:
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities
They are already implemented on /kbin - as Collections
Once I thoroughly understand Lemmy’s functionality through the Sublinks Re-implementation (since Rust is like Greek to me but Java I know), I want to try and put in a community tag feature that would be able to assemble a feed of communities across the Fediverse dedicated to one topic.
I may take me 6 months to a year if I commit to it, but I do think some community aggregation mechanism like that is sorely missing from Lemmy and could help distribute post load better while ensuring a userbase on non-general topics remain active.
That seems promising
I’m not a software engineer by trade so no guarantees, but I’ve been wanting to improve it in some way. I still have yet to understand how Lemmy works, but from using Lemmy I’ve identified two big areas that could use improvement:
Community Tags: Mods being able to tag communities on topics for better aggregation of related communities.
Post Flairs: Users/Mods being able to assign a flair to a post for better client-side filtering of posts, from either a pre-defined list or freeform based on community preference.
For ActivityPub compatibility purposes, either of these could potentially be analogous to Mastodon hashtags, but I still have yet to decide on how that would work especially without it becoming tumblr level.
No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.
You didn’t read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I’m not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.
I don’t think I would ever be in favor of activity that leads to further centralization. I don’t disagree that fragmentation can make things somewhat confusing for new users, but there are some advantages as well. I like to post to smaller communities for the most part rather than the larger ml and world domains. The responses are more focused on the topic at hand, the communities are usually less hostile and hive-minded, and having all discussions on a just a few big servers leads to a the problem of having all of your eggs in one basket (ie. discussions and accounts disappearing when these servers can’t maintain server costs, the admins move on to other projects, or just poor maintenance practices.) To me it is worth the effort to cross-post and seek out other communities to find interesting content.
Indeed, if these places are able to survive, they’ll survive. No need to force it.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society. Half the reason I’m here is to build. Not consolidate.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society.
This is a brilliant and eloquent observation. My only concern is that younger people (and more specifically younger people from North America, the dominant demographic here and on reddit) never even had a third-place to begin with, so they wouldn’t know what they are missing.
I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.
Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that’s fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that’s okay.
, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
[citation needed]
I don’t see any community that has been mechanically, forcibly moved over to another instance. I can still post to !cats@a.net and !cats@b.xyz separately.
Cooking communities merged:
That’s what I meant with natural merging of communities
That’s good to see, but still doesn’t cover the case of what happens if those communities are in different instances. That’s the really big issue with merging (naturally or not).
!unixporn@lemmy.ml is the reference. !unixporn@lemmy.world still exists, but has much less activity. There was some backlash at the time about the subreddit mods wanting to take over the .lw community, so everybody fled to .ml
I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:
I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.
Id say that the obvious answer is the Linux community with the most members. !linux@lemmy.ml has more than double the number of subscribers of the next most active Linux community.
Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation
It makes me feel like I should be making the post to multiple communities, but then I feel like I’m spamming
It does kinda suck being defederated from big instances like lemmy.ml because there are big communities there, but at the other end it’s nice to have alternatives on different instances. For example, I can’t view !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml but I can access !programmer_humor@programming.dev.
The PDev version is better anyway.
I have a few communities that are still on .ml, I forgot you guys were defederated, maybe I should move them elsewhere
Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation
Hopefully defederation will happen less and less with 19.X allowing users to block instances themselves
Yeah I think there needs to be more options though, for admins and for users. Like conditional caching or proxying of images from other instances.
And not just blocking instances but choosing to block all the users from an instance without blocking their communities, or only blocking their comments not their posts. Also admins should be able to set default blocks that all the users get but can change individually
And you’ll eventually get banned from it for not praising Stalin hard enough
Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about what they are saying.
Literally spoken as a leftist who has gotten bans for not being a Maoist bootlicker. My accounts with this name across multiple instances are the on a short leash for daring to question ML dogma.
If you don’t insert politics into normal conversations and you value relationships more than you value being right (left) then this should not be an issue.
Stay away from the political communities and don’t feel like you need to correct people when they spout out political bullshit.
But I want to discuss politics and worldnews. I’m just not allowed, because wrongthink.
But then you’re on .ml
.ml is okay to discuss Linux, the overlap between the two communities makes sense
The overlap between authoritarians and Linux?
Well I suppose North Korea does run the closed source RedStarOS.
what makes you think they are authoritarian?
Because we all know how tankies are, so stop acting coy.
Maybe you should go conquer some bread instead of trying to defend maoists and stalinists.
I meant hardcore leftists
Oh like me?
Yeah we do overlap with Linux, the tankies however don’t.
You don’t need an account on lemmy.ml to subscribe to any community there. For example, I run my own self-hosted instance and none of the communities I’m subscribed to are from my own instance.
Oh I meant more that you’re interacting with them.
In this case, it’s the first, which is obvious based on the number of subscribers and active users. You don’t even need a third party tool, it’s literally in the sidebar
It happens! I moderate !hockey@lemmy.ca, and recently !hockey@lemmy.world merged with us naturally.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that needing your comments mirrored perfectly everywhere in every community comes off as a bit:
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Obsessive / Compulsive
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Narcissistic
I don’t need to be involved in every conversation about the subjects I’m interested in, and I don’t need everyone in every community to see what I have to say, and having problems with things not being that way, well… It just comes off as very weirdly self-focused.
I mean, this is no different than reddit having millions of subreddits and having multiple posts of the same article in many different ones, with many different conversations.
Also, didn’t we learn any lessons from Reddit? Like making each community as big as possible means the community becomes less of a community and more of a chore? It’s asking for Eternal September to happen more quickly, by shoving everyone in the same box as fast as possible.
The fact that there’s a bunch of splintered, smaller communities is actually what I like about Lemmy.
All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.
Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.
Obsessive and narcissistic because there are many duplicate communities and it’s frustrating to try and find out which ones to use? Okay…
All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.
Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.
It just sounds like you didn’t read the post and made up a narrative in your head about what it’s about.
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The same topic communities should merge under the same page unless the mods don’t want it.
What about the (non) fictitious problem when you have several (similar) communities dedicated to the same topic on the same instance? What then?
Same solutions apply. They don’t have to be across different instances to be able to group them somehow.
As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a ‘problem’? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.
People are pushing for it because they see the amount of people here as a finite number that shouldn’t be spread too thin.
I’m more on the side advocating to get more people here so that we don’t worry about how many communities we have on the same topic
I completely agree. Having multiple communities is just the way to keep things democratic.
I really don’t think this is a major problem for Lemmy. Users won’t find the proper community and leave Lemmy, or what’s the idea here?
I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.
I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.
This problem is part of why there’s not enough activity. Any activity that happens in the threadiverse is spread across multiple, duplicate communities. That makes it harder for communities to build up active userbases and makes users themselves less likely to post or comment.
In theory yes, but everyone posts to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml, so I haven’t seen this becoming a practical problem myself.
I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don’t see an issue with duplicate communities.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366
I hope they can revisit the idea. There are many cases of duplicate communities splintering the community, making finding content more difficult.
Do you have an example? Because all the evidence shows that people want to be seen when they post, and will naturally gravitate towards the most active communities, except if they are against the instance the most active community is.
Because all the evidence shows…
What evidence shows that? This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.
You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I’m subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn’t happen.
What evidence shows that?
The merge of the cooking communities I shared with you in another comment: https://lemmy.world/post/7578470
This post is in fediverse@lemmy.world and crossposted to fediverse@lemmy.ml. There’s also fediverse@kbin.social and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.
- fediverse.world: 104 comments
- fediverse.ml: 7 comments
Didn’t find it in https://kbin.social/m/fediverse nor in any other community except lemmy.ml (2 comments)
Don’t you think that we pretty much consolidated around fediverse.world?
For Linux, the main one is !linux@lemmy.ml.
For movies, the most active is !moviesandtv@lemm.ee, there is also !movies@lemmy.world, but it’s getting less and less active, so we’ll probably consolidate around the first one soon.
Gaming is an interesting choice, there are a few of them, but each have their reasons of existing
- !gaming@lemmy.world is for people who like LW
- !games@sh.itjust.works is for people who prefer to stay away from LW
- !gaming@beehaw.org like the slower and more moderated aspect of beehaw.
There are others, but the interesting aspect is in this case, every community has enough people to stay active.
I don’t think we’ve consolidated around fediverse@lemmy.world. You’re using a single post as an example. I’ve posted links that got 40+ comments in fediverse@kbin.social but way less in other communities. I’ve posted or seen threads in fediverse@lemmy.ml that got more discussion.
The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn’t sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I’d bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to cooking@lemmy.world anyway.
What I’m talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren’t necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They’ll see communities they’re interested in and sub, but then won’t see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.
Even if consolidation is happening, there’s a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find movies@a.com or movies@b.com but if they’re grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.
If you want an example of community consolidation between different servers, there is !unixporn@lemmy.ml and !unixporn@lemmy.world. Most of the activity if happening on lemmy.ml, and there was a backlash when the mods from the sub wanted to takeover the lemmy.world community. Both are still open, but someone who wants to post would see that the LW isn’t as active as the .ml, and post to the latter.
About your point, there are two things at hand.
First, the technical possibility of it happening. It has been linked elsewhere, the Lemmy devs are not interested in this. Kbin has it, somehow, but the userbase is now on Lemmy, and I don’t see it moving the Kbin/Mbin, except if they surpass Lemmy in features. Maybe sublinks will have this, we’ll see.
But beyond the technical aspect, there is also the “political” aspect. People who don’t like communities on LW are not going to enjoy being forced to have their content shared to LW communities too. People who avoid Lemmy.ml due to the political stance of the users are also not going to be happy to discuss with the people they are trying to avoid.
The point is that Lemmy has been around for some months now, people know each others, the other servers, and more or less where everyone stands. If people keep communities separated, there is a reason, and it’s not going to be solved by technical measures.
the Lemmy devs are not interested in this
I know. I’m the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn’t it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.
there is also the “political” aspect
Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.
Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.
Your arguments against it seem to be:
- Its not needed. - I’ve pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn’t happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don’t have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don’t know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you’ve centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
- People might not want it - The proposal doesn’t force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities’ members.
I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that. Either the communities you’re in don’t join up with others or they do and you wouldn’t notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)
It’s not a problem. It’s a great feature. Because there’s more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you’re free to do so. But I’m also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.
It’s always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they’re brainless and they just think of Lemmy as “the new Reddit” (or Mastodon as “the new Twitter”).
To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.
I don’t think it’s a huge issue, there were often multiple communities for the same thing on reddit
I just wish threads using the same link and threads that are crossposted shared comments with a link on top of the comment that said the title of the original post.
It sucks when an article is posted to 5 communities and i have to go to each one to read all the comments. I want to read all the comments about the article in one place. If the thread is about something specific and uses the same link I would still understand the context because the comment would include the link/title of the original thread it was posted to.
That’s exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.
Why couldn’t this be solved at the client level? Whenever you go to a thread, the client could check the submission URL and inline comments from matching posts from other subscribed communities.
Reddit already does that with their “related diacussions” tab. It would be a lot more elegant, requires no extensions in the spec, no changes in the server side and easily prototyped/tested.
requires no extensions in the spec
That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.
no changes in the server side
But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.
easily prototyped/tested
Every fediverse platform already supports following
Actors. That’s part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client.
Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior. There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?
One is not inherently better than the other.
When it comes to decentralized technologies and systems, it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the leaf nodes as much as possible. The less things are mandated on the server, the easier it is to build a robust system. Pushing as much functionality as possible to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.
Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior
Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don’t have to send a follow request and the other community doesn’t have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It’s all optional.
There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?
There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.
it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible… Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.
The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.
The proposal would allow one community to follow another
Who determines when a community should follow another? The admin? The user?
If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented,
My point is that it a lot easier to implement something that solves the problem that you are describing than asking for a whole change in the implementation of the server.
The nodes are the servers not the clients. (…) The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (…) is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.
It’s a trade-off between speed to deliver the base case vs the lack of flexibility to deliver a more flexible version of it. And the more that we push to the server, the slower it will be to be able to extend it. Case in point: People have been complaining about the lack of algoritmic timelines on Mastodon. The Mastodon developers will find all sorts of excuses to not have to implement it… “Algorithms are bad for people”, “People are just too used with how things in Big Tech”, “we rather working on moderation and safety”… etc. All of those are bad rationalizations for them to avoid doing work they don’t want to do. Which is fine, the devs are not forced to develop anything. The interesting things is that this problem was solved a lot faster by flipping it around and pushing to the client. And it works so well that that people now can even choose what type of algorithm they want to run.
Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says.
I’m personally of the mind that we should be imagining a world where all 3 of these solutions are at play. 1 is absolutely the most important, and Admins should be taking an active role here where possible (particularly as it relates to dead community cleanup). I personally think they are the missing element needed to negotiate these sorts of consolidations. 2 and 3 on the other hand are pretty simple features and even if Lemmy never takes it on, I think it’s reasonable that any one of the new fediverse link aggregators could take this up. The only other thing I’ll say is multi-communities absolutely must be sharable. Ideally, it should even be possible to link multi-communities with the “!” syntax or similar.
1 is absolutely the most important,
1 is literally the worst of the three, opening the Fediverse to a death at the hands of corporate. And I’ve already explained its other issues.
