Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

Personally I think proposal 2 and 3 should happen concurrently. Using the example in the post I would setup a custom feed (that can hopefully consolidate cross posts) for breakfast. I would put pancakes@a.com which subscribes to pancakemasters@b.com I can also add pancakeart@a.com and waffles@a.com. so when someone posts about the best homemade peanut butter syrup recipe that is cross posted to my pancake and waffle communities, I don't get 4 posts about it, I can see it once and choose where to reply (pancakes obviously, I'm a waffle purist).

Community interlinking/subscription fixes a slightly different problem than custom feeds IMO. It's a really good idea, but I would personally still want custom feeds (with the ability to handle crossposts in a customizable way).

It shouldn't be difficult to group some community automatically then users can edit it if they want

Wouldn’t that go against decentralization?

Better to not have to start over 100% if the main community is on a server that randomly disappears forever or turns sour and gets defederated.

Because each instance and community had it's own rules. With custom feeds user can choose with communities he want to consolidate and separate them again if he want

Because problems could arise by relying on a single community. Proposal 3 retains the duplicate communities while eliminating the problems that duplicate communities currrently cause.

This use case seems to be more for situations when you do have 2 more relatively active communities (with one being smaller).

It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don't need to find dead remote communities in their search results. If there are multiple active communities, that's not an issue, and there's no real reason to homogenize them behind lizard brain FOMO. If there's one active community and 6 dead ones, there's no reason for users to find any of the dead ones.

Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream "I want centralization".

I think I just see the problem as a little different than "how can we make things easy for people." A lot of modern web design is "make it as easy as possible," but I don't think that actually always leads to the best experience. I really liked the take that the video I posted has on it.

If I had to describe the underlying problems with Lemmy, they would include things like "How do we stop anonymous accounts from being obnoxious" or "How can we put more of the control of people's experience in their own hands, instead of having moderators being able to 'override' a consenting communication between two people who want to have it." Both of those, I feel like, may actually involve making things harder for the average user to come onboard and figure out what's going on, or navigate the system effectively. But then if they're able to overcome that (honestly, pretty modest) obstacle, the end result is better. In my view that is ok. There's other stuff than just making it easy.

Yeah, I'm all for making stuff smooth with these different proposals, I didn't mean it to sound like I was not. I was just saying that making things easy is not always the best or most valuable of the goals.

I'm sure plenty exceptions exist - that's why I said "typically", it's that sort of generalisation that applies less to real individuals and more to an abstract "typical user".

It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.

Same experience here

But if you sub to all of them then there is zero need for such a feed. It adds extra work of making the feed and having to select the feed. There is barely enough content for viewing subscribed my new, why split a post or two a day into a separate feed?

How would modding work on that? I'm not sure I fully understand.

Excellent write-up of the problem and its potential solutions!

Do you know if Proposal 3 has made it to the Lemmy devs? If so, what was their response to it?

So… Reddit?

I don't know, I just shared agut feeling while reading the OP. And I'm not saying it's what we should thrive for, just sharing that gut feeling about what, like I said, I consider a critical issue on Lemmy.

With the cancelled third-party apps, the visible ads, the ads hiding as posts, the powertripping mods (but unpaid as well), the algorithm trying to get the most “engagement” by showing hateful content?

That's a whole other discussion imho. But if you want to discuss about that:

• I only talked about a centralized system (aka, a unified one) and, once again, I did not say it was the solution only that it felt like that while I was reading the post. As far as I know, centralization does not imply the obligation to rely on algorithm (and ads, paywalls, or nothing dirty like that).
• As far as mods abusing their power is an issue (it is), I think we do have a few on Lemmy too. Isn't there a community dedicated to that issue?
• Ditto for the 'hateful content' (and I would add the extremely low effort posts too), it was a pain on Reddit, it's a pain on Lemmy too there is just of it on Lemmy because there are less of us posting ;)
  I consider the Reddit default home page an insult to any half-working brain but I would not be much more sympathetic to Lemmy's default feed either. I remember we briefly discussed that already: I'd rather see an empty feed by default, with only a short-ish selection of very broad categories the user would pick from to start seeing content that they're interested in. And only that content, not all the crap. They would then be able to start fine tuning their selection. Something like that.
• Reducing Reddit to what you listed here would be... unfair to the great content and great discussion one can easily find over there. As an ex-Reddit user, after an adaptation time (learning how to get rid of the default crap feed and how to remove the crap ads, learning what subs were better ignored) I had a great time using Reddit (and that is despite its poor UI). I did not quit using it because of the flow of hate or the flow of moronic content, nor because of abusive mods (quite the opposite, I appreciated their work... thx to fine selection of the few subs I was subscribed to). I did not quit reddit for that, no more than I would quit Lemmy for those flaws either. I left because I hated how Reddit, the corporation, took hold of our content and started restricting access to our content in order to negotiate deals with partners. And started talking about paywalling some of it. I briefly explained it as a last post on my Reddit profile and I close the door behind me. But I do miss those interesting discussions I had, and I miss a few subs too (r/Simpleliving, would be the first one I would mention).
  If I was not admitting I miss that I would be a liar.
• I also find it difficult to motivate/encourage more people to join and participate here on Lemmy because I'm myself constantly faced with the 'messy' aspects of Lemmy. I'm stubborn and I decided I could live with them (happily) but I also know many people are not ok with that and it's unlikely they ever will.

Hence me agreeing with the OP: Lemmy being as fragmented as it is is a critical issue.
Hence, the second part of my comment: it feels to me that the only easy/obvious solution is to rely on a centralized system. I'm not saying it's what should be done (I would not be part of the fediverse if I had no desire to see an alternative to that centralization). I may be wrong in that, most probably I'm (I have no technical expertise) but it still is what I felt while reading the post. Nothing more.

And for the rest, let the downvoters enjoy their very own moment of power ;)

Well, merging communities means trying to reduce the number of alternative communities on the same topic, or did I miss something?

But, like I said, I'm not saying it is not doable. I'm only sharing how I felt reading the OP post.

That's more like Proposal 2, and doesn't actually solve the main issues with duplicate communities. Proposal 3 solves them quite elegantly.

Is that a long-winded way of saying pancakes are dull? :p

I'm on Lemmy off and on for hours a day. I see most posts using the "all" feed. Few people are in social isolation from physical disability with near infinite spare time or other circumstances that enable this. There are many times I wish Lemmy had more total volume of participation than the "all" feed. This is what I want to grow.

Because that defeats the purpose of Federation. If one of the communities becomes infiltrated with nazis or whatever they can be defederated and removed from the the base "pool".

Say you have a base pool of communities for all "motorcycle" related content. Anything from MotoGP stuff to general dirtbike stuff, who knows. Of course there are going to be some communities about Harleys in there and of course one of those is going to inevitably skew towards white nationalist nonsense. Well there ya go that's out of the pool with that BS and everyone else gets to go about their day.

If they want to create their own motorcycle pool of communities then so be it but they don't need to infect the rest of the of us.

......get.......out.