I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:
- If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
- If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?
I was subscribed to android@lemmy.world, and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.
For me, I subscribe to all the multiple ones of the same topic and let time sort out their popularity.
That, and whether you like their home instances. If there’s a popular technology sub that isn’t on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org, I’d eventually switch to using that one exclusively
It’s not dealt with. You subscribe to one or many of them and then your home feed will show what it shows. People should not be cross posting unless you are actively involved in multiple similar communities and intend to participate in multiple identical discussions.
If you are just posting a link, provide no thoughts of your own and then do the same in multiple other places then your post is close to worthless and is more like an ad.
They haven’t. I’ve given up on finding new communities at this point since it’s a ton of work to figure out which ones are active and which ones are worth subscribing to.
It’s one of the biggest problems with the platform, despite it also being one of the biggest selling points.
I disagree, I haven’t found it much of an issue. I do two things:
- Every once in a while I use Lemmy Explorer to look at what’s available and how active.
- Sort by “All” and one of the short “Tops” or, more often, “New” to see where things I’m interested in are being posted, then subscribed to those.
I’m not sure why the duplicates are a big deal. What problems do they cause?
Confusion and activity.
If there’s 4 different communities for my already niche community, none of the 4 are going to have decent levels of participation.
I don’t like being subscribed to a large number of communities. It gets hard to sort and read. I prefer to have my subscribed list being small and focused and then just searching for anything else, which doesn’t really work.
I hated having to discover subreddits too, so it’s nothing new for me
With Reddit, sorting by new was insane - so many submittals every minute that it was a useless approach for finding subs. But Lemmy is orders of magnitude smaller - you can do all/new and get a pretty good feel for content in a dozen pages. Can do the same with top day.
Long term, I think the competing communities could be an issue, but I doubt many duplicate sets will stay long term - people will migrate to the most active.
Sounds like you might find this useful https://lemmyverse.net/communities
While that’s useful, I’m not a fan of needing to subscribe to individual communities. I like keeping my subscribed feed to a few subs that I interact with regularly. I’m an outlier of a use case for sure, but it was the same on Reddit. Only ever subscribed to 8-10 communities, the rest were from the front pages.
Thanks, yes, I agree
I think this could be “solved” on client side. On Reddit you could (can? Idk) merge various subs to a single view, maybe clients like Memmy could do the same.
Merging multiple communities like in a Reddit multisub would not solve the issue of duplicated posts in one’s feed.
Nothing solved that problem on Reddit either =]
The way I use multis in Reddit is to create bigger topics, and I rarely see duplicated posts. For example, in Reddit I do not have a multi for subs /r/android1, /r/android2, /r/android3. However, I have a multi for mobile OSs, grouping /r/android and /r/iOS. Rarely do I see duplication.
That looks like something that could be done on client as well, doesn’t it? I don’t know if posts have UUIDs or something but maybe it can be done.
The problem is that posts may be exactly on the same trending topic, but not exactly the same. They could link to two different news sources for essentially the same news item. Or they could be a text or an image post about the same. Reddit mods would usually remove this kind of soft duplication within the same sub, and instead encourage to comment to one single post.
Still, it would be an acceptable tradeoff for me.
This is Lemmy’s greatest weakness, in my opinion. It’s too decentralized. I want one place (Lemmy) to go to for everything about my topics of interest. Everyone keeps explaining it as “lemmy.world is like Reddit and lemmy.ml is like Twitter.” No. No it’s not. It’s all Lemmy. It’s just that there are multiple Lemmys, each with their own separate sections for each topic, and anyone can make a new Lemmy at any time. That’s a problem. I don’t want to become part of a community, no matter how big and popular it becomes, only to find out that there is a better one on a different Lemmy server and I’ve been wasting my time this whole time. This just means that if Lemmy were set up properly then that better community would have been the one that I would have found because it is easy to find and the website design lends itself to finding relevant topics of interest. Right now Lemmy is so frustrating to use. It looks worse than Old Reddit and is less user friendly than New Reddit. Lemmy will never see the popularity or usefulness that Reddit has had if it stays decentralized like this. Imagine asking your friend where on Twitter they found an interesting post and they reply, “No, no, it’s not on Twitter 35, it’s on Twitter 83.” That’s dumb as hell. We don’t need multiple Reddits, multiple Twitters, or multiple Lemmys.
Not in any singular way, it is handled however those people wish to handle it. They have freedom.
I dont think you understand the point of Lemmy. Lack of centralization is key! And not just of instances, but communities too. Fragmentation is kind of the point.
I think I do understand it. One of my points above is one community decided to merge into the other to prevent fragmentation. Not my own words, sticky post on android@lemmy.world.
Thats because the mods of that community also don’t understand lemmy either. Their could be a million communities for the same topic. It doesn’t matter.
The mods decided to merge. Don’t conflate the mods with the community. Plenty of members weren’t interested in migrating and merging, and they shouldn’t have to participate.
There’s no reason they can’t stay in the old community.
The “old” community was frozen.
https://lemmy.world/post/1117612
“Our feeling, and our decision, is that while having multiple communities for the same topic is a key strength of the fediverse, we’re keen to avoid unnecessary fragmentation for existing members and confusion for any newcomers.”
https://lemmy.world/post/75670?scrollToComments=true
Or any of the other threads coming up in the search: https://lemmy.world/search?q=multiple communities&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll
Thanks!
Not at the Lemmy level, at the community level.
Sign up to all of them, and post to the most popular/the one that feels to be the best.
I think the happy medium will be front-end functionality that allows users to collate subs into “multireddits” and have easy access to their multis. The act of subscribing to new communities is not that hard, and interacting with them is more or less seamless on a full feed. The only time I find it gets tedious is if I just want a feed of niche content. It may indeed resolve itself over time, but for now it’s a bit annoying to track down my subs to 5 different woodworking communities across 4 different instances. The good thing about handling it optionally and on the front-end is that there’s no need to rethink ActivityPub at all and the feature would remain useful even if certain communities become the go-to for a given topic.
The multi does not solve the fact that we’re going to see multiple similar posts on the same trending topic, with comments/discussions distributed among them. One of the things mods do on reddit is to exactly prevent this in each sub. Here, mods can prevent this in each community, but not solving the duplication in multiple communities of different servers.
In that case, we start getting into the “Lemmy is not Reddit” issue. Tildes is a “small by intention” reddit clone, and Squabbles is a “dude hopes to get rich” reddit clone, but both are self-contained; they have different issues than the threadiverse. For Kbin in particular, I have seen people noodling around with mockups on how to present identical URLs in a sort of nested way so the user can pick which discussion thread they go to, and that could be helpful, but at a certain point you either accept the annoyance of redundancy, possibly hoping it will fade as communities evolve, or else you unsubscribe from the source of that annoyance.
I would love it if Lemmy adopted Misskey’s ‘Antenna’ feature. It provides custom timelines based on saved searches.
Give us community and post tags, allow for custom timelines based on saved searches, and Bob’s your uncle.
