I’ve been on Lemmy for 10 days now and I really enjoy it. The federation is really cool, but compared to Reddit it does have a downside: fragmentation of communities.
I think it would be really cool to be able to combine the feeds of the community Random_topic@example_instance_1 with Random_topic@example_instance_2 etc.
This could work well for reading, but I realize that posting is more difficult. So when posting you should be able to choose on what instance you want to post to the Random_topic ‘community group’.
What do you think?
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I think a voluntary sync between instances/communities is the next step. I think you’re proposing a client-side solution, which would be helpful, but a back-end solution that allows instances (or at least communities) to sync everything will be a better experience, and help prevent one instance from “owning” too much of the traffic.
So on the server side, it would be like how DNS servers work to “propograte” the hostname data so that users are served the same content but distributing the load between multiple servers?
Edit: I think I’m actually just describing CloudFlare 😅
Yeah, great analogy.
there are already few relevant issues open on GitHub about this. Go in there and voice your suggestions there as well.
I’m not a programmer and have very limited Github experience, but I’ll have a look.
I don’t think the fragmentation is necessarily not present on Reddit. There are subs on there that are on the same topic, there’s nothing stopping someone from creating a duplicate just because they’re on the same server, ya know?
One thing that ends up happening over there is that both are active but with different types of community culture. For example, there’s /r/JonBenetRamsey which is where people who believe someone in the family did it congregate, and /r/JonBenet which consists primarily of people who think an intruder is responsible.
Or, there are multiple subs for the same or highly overlapping topics and people just subscribe to both/many. Even if they cover the same topic, since they’re in separate spaces they don’t necessarily have that behemoth sub feel. On Reddit I’m subscribed to wicca, wiccan, and witch. (I was also subscribed to witchcraft until the mod made an unhinged post about how the API thing didn’t matter to anyone, and I got banned for my reply which was polite but disagreed lol.) All have activity.
The other outcome on Reddit is that one sub thrives and becomes the default, and the others just don’t have any activity so people don’t sub.
This is a very long-winded way to say, I think the solution to your problem is just joining both communities, and you’ll see both in your feed as a result.
This is a very long-winded way to say, I think the solution to your problem is just joining both communities, and you’ll see both in your feed as a result.
Sure, but all communities of all kinds of topics are in my feed. A way to organize by topic would be nice.
Something like the multireddit function then, maybe? Custom feeds where you can add any communities that you want (doesn’t even have to be the same topic).
I don’t think it makes sense to combine the feeds at a federation level (which I think is what you’re talking about, but correct me if I’m wrong). There may be non-topic reasons that some users would want to join/read one but not another. And who would determine whether topics were similar enough to warrant having combined feeds?
Being able to make your own personal multi-community feeds would definitely be a nice feature. That wouldn’t have any issue with posting, either.
Something like the multireddit function then, maybe? Custom feeds where you can add any communities that you want (doesn’t even have to be the same topic).
I don’t think it makes sense to combine the feeds at a federation level (which I think is what you’re talking about, but correct me if I’m wrong).
No I was thinking about a client side solution. I don’t even know what multireddit is but it sounds like that is what I meant. Though since [@[email protected]]{https://lemmy.ml/comment/527123) mentioned it, syncing of communities between instances could also be a cool idea.
There’s an open GitHub ticket for something analogous multireddit’s: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818, but as you note that’s really just a read-only view.
People talk about community fragmentation like Lemmy invented it. There are TONS of duplicate and overlapping communities on Reddit. There’s /r/tech and /r/technology, /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, a zillion aita clone subs. Dupes are everywhere.
IMO what we need to manage community dupes is actually better community discovery. What makes duplicate communities less of a problem in Reddit is that when a community has good mods and starts to accumulate membership, it gets pushed up the search rankings in a snowball effect. Other subs grow less active and the well-manged one dominates. Remote community discovery is so poor on Lemmy that it’s a total tossup which option you find in the results… which currently makes the dupe situation a “problem”. But it’s my belief that if community discovery was better, dupe communities would mostly naturally aggregate into a few well run options.
