1y ago

If the ideal setup is many medium sized instances rather than a few huge ones, wouldn't that mean users would need to subscribe to duplicate communities in all of those instances?

Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn't that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?

If that's the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?

41 comments

Duplicate communities are good. Reddit's biggest problem was that a group of mods would take over a topic and prevent all opinions different from their own. Here you can just jump to an alternative community.
- I mostly agree, but look at the Technology community. Technology@beehaw.org, Technology@lemmy.ml, Technology@kbin.social, Technology@lemmy.world. They are all about the same thing and subscribing them all gets a lot of dupes.
- That would really depend on the community and I would argue that it is easier to take up your concerns with the admin of the instance, if a community is being mismanaged, than it would be on Reddit.
  
  I had r/europe and r/worldnews in mind. Both communities had been hijacked by mods who turned them into echo chambers.
- I wonder if this level of abstraction will mean a long-term sustainment of the golden days that past social platforms have had in early adopter periods. Specifically I mean platforms that predate Reddit, eg. Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, even FB in the pre-genpop days. Prior to that is before my time of early adoption (MySpace, LiveJournal, Friendster), so I have less historical context.

This stuff tends to come out in the wash. Yeah, there are duplicates, but that was true on reddit too. And just like on reddit, people will settle on one or two communities, and the people that don't like those big communities will stick to the smaller niche ones.
- Yep.
  Not sure why people struggle with this. On Reddit you have aww, but you can also have awww, awwww, aww1, awwpets, awwwpet, and so on.
  People tend to pick the bigger ones some go for niche ones, whatever.

Y'all are coming here trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit.
- ugh it was the worst during the mass migration. People leaving Reddit just outright being hostile at everyone - devs,mods, users, didnt matter. Just shouting at everyone demanding that it be exactly Reddit immediately.

Admins simply need to take responsibility. If a community already exists in the Lemmyverse, I don’t allow it to be created on my instance.
- Unfortunately, that's the wrong thinking. There are different kinds of mods for controversial topics. Let's say: UFOs. Mods on one lemmy instance might allow only sightings (that's the deal with the reddit one, for example), but another one might allow also for abductions (as it should, since it's part and parcel with the whole thing for many people). So disallowing communities from existing on different servers, it controls the narrative and creates pigeonhole opinions. It needs to be something for everyone instead.
  
  Just because you disagree with my opinion, doesn't make it "the wrong thinking" 😊
  I see what you mean, but there will always be someone who disagrees with the mods of a community. Instead of creating yet another c/ufo community, it would make more sense to create c/ufo_abductions fx. Your example is a good case for actually creating another c/ufo, but controversy is not going to be the issue every time someone wants to create an already existing community.
  And I'm not saying there can't be any duplicate communities at all. I just think admins should give it some thought, before creating the 8th c/technology community.
  As @maegul@lemmy.ml also said, it would be something I would also take into consideration as well, if someone asked to have a community created on my instance.
  
  Yea ... that's why I ask a new community that seems like a duplicate what they're going to do differently. I think being open and explicit about differences, even if slight, is pretty important.
- That's the thing, if instance admins do that to avoid duplicate communities, won't that just mean that a few huge instances will be the ones with most of the popular communities, and have outsized sway/traffic costs?
  Then we're back to square one and defeat the whole purpose of distributing load across many medium instances. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
  
  You’re not putting traffic on the server that hosts a community when you browse it from another instance. Also, I believe when you post and upload an image it’s hosted on the server you’re browsing on, not the federated one that has the community.
  
  I suppose the "best" way would be to distribute the big communities over different instances, like one instance gets "pics", another gets "memes", someone else gets "news", etc. But of course that will never happen.
  
  This is what has already happened to some extend, but communities are free to move away to another instance. Fx !Android!android@lemmy.world moved to !Android!android@lemdro.id.
  You could also say that the moderators of communities that exist on multiple instances, have a certain responsibility as well, but it is tricky. Beehaw.org has many of the same communities that the rest of the Lemmyverse has, but they also defederate with the biggest instance lemmy.world.
  
  I'm taking a more free-spirited approach to my instance, communities can be formed as the users please here. The ideal would be lots of medium-sized instances each with a few large communities, but ultimately people will join where they want and we don't have much control over it.

just subscribe to a few of the more active communities, or
pick and choose which flavor of community you agree with
just like Reddit, none of the communities are exact duplicates, each has a different vibe, a different raison d’être, a different subscriber base, a different pool of commenters …

It's the same as the Internet. You have lots of websites that cover the same topic. The main difference is that lemmy defines a standard the different sites can follow to communicate with each other in a consistent way

I'm pretty keen on tech so I've been going through the magazines on kbin, the community on Lemmy and the other random "places" to find subscriptions.
I don't mind subscribing to multiple things so long as eventually everyone can see it and comment / engage.
- Yup, I have like four subscriptions to similar communities, and I'll probably end up removing the ones I don't like as much. Each community has a different feel and will appeal to different people. Also, if one instance goes down, I can fall back to another.
  That said, this strategy probably increases load on my instance since now I'm getting content from multiple sources instead of just one, and there's a fair amount of duplicate content.

If you post to a community that is hosted on a different server, your post is still stored on your home server. The community server is basically just the aggregator. If the community or server goes down the posts are still hosted on their respective home servers.
- So if a home server goes down will those posts disappear from the community server? And what if it goes down temporarily and not permanently, do the posts stored on the home server temporarily disappear?
  
  So if a home server goes down will those posts disappear from the community server?
  terminology wise, "home server of a community" and then there are remote-servers for that community. And Lemmy community/devs tend to call a "server" an "instance". To answer your question... if a user is on a remote instance from a community, they are reading copies of the content in a local database. If the community home instance goes down, the copies will still be there in the remote servers. However, they are now in an isolated island and none of the other servers will get the new post and comments - as the home instance of a community does distribution. There isn't any kind of warning indicator that you are on an isolated island.
  Nothing disappears, but it is possible to have incomplete replication - have only some of the comments and posts and get an impression that nobody replied or that there isn't much content.

I wonder how feasible it would be to set your instance up to aggregate content from duplicate communities.
- We need something like "Multi-subreddits", where you can combine communities into the same entity. Only issue is that a lot of the same posts are posted a cross all the same communities.
  
  I've been thinking about this all morning and have come up with this:
  When the link is the same, we can just union on the thread and sort it as any other thread.
  When the link is not the same, but the content is similar, I wonder if you could run a semantic comparison (I'm only just starting to learn about this), and when the comparison scores above a certain threshold, union the threads.
  Self-text posts might just make sense to leave alone.
- A multi-community feature like multi-reddit wouldn't be that hard to implement. Basically build a subscribe list that isn't owned by a specific user and come up with a way to link them by name and ID. Being able to share community subscribe and block lists would seem a useful evolution of Lemmy.

Federation is the key. If I'm on A and I want to see B, A just needs to federate with B.
- Does that mean that a community on instance A acts like it were native to instance B?
  
  They'll see each other in "all," but not "local."

Yeah that'll be another problem we'll have to figure out. Maybe if there are two meme servers, we could bridge the communities somehow so they're just one feed for the end user.

41 comments