1y ago

Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice?

Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

people having to subscribe to both to see the content
posters having to crosspost to both
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

100 comments

Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.
There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.
- A cool feature would be an opt in community federation. So two aligned communities on different instances can "friend" each other and will be synonymous. If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.
  
  This would require content addressing to be robust. It's what bluesky's atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).
  https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol
  A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.
- This is the best answer that we should strive towards. Deduplication and community combining. Deduplication is hard but a lot of other places have been attempting it for years so methods have already come a long way. Community combining could be done through partnered aggregation and tagging of communities
  
  With Lemmy's design that would most easily be done through mirroring. One main community and the rest are replicating it.
- Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
  Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
  
  This 100% goes against the purpose of federation. Buy one instance, own the feddiverse.
  
  No, this would be just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, a single monolithic social media website. That one instance would have higher running costs, and also greater power and influence and would be able to shape the narrative on controversial issues.
- I agree with you completely and kinda assumed this was already in place tbh.

I think Lemmy.world should not have 99.999% of communities.
We can have one fediverse community but it should not be on Lemmy.world. It's already extreamly centralized with almost all users. It should have all communities as well?
I feel the same about every other duplicate community. Because i actually care about having a decentralized fediverse.
- .ml also has a lot of active communities though. While I agree .ml is better than .world, feeding any one of these won't be good for decentralization anyway.
  
  Completely agree.
  Pushing for https://lemmy.film/, literature.cafe/, https://mander.xyz/ etc. as much as I can, but the established communities usually have the natural inertia working for them.
  
  Just picking from those two, but yes, I agree. I would put it on a instance that is below the top 10 instances, and I would do the same for all duplicate communities.

Lemmy neads a feature where people can "merge" communities from different instances so it appears like a single one.
- How will they merge moderation then? Every instance has their own set of rules. If it's done automatically, it will cause a lot of trouble in a long run.
  
  Doesn't have to, it would just be on the user end.
  Like on reddit you could do multi-reddits, for example I could type in r/anime_titties+worldnews+news and I would get posts from all 3 communities in a single feed.
- @theKalash
  Lemmy neads a feature where people can “merge” communities from different instances so it appears like a single one
  I'm confused by this. I'll admit I haven't used Lemmy much yet, but I thought communities do exist across all servers? So if I join "c/fediverse" on any one server, and you join "c/fediverse" on any other server, we're joining the same community. Is that not how it works?
  @Blaze
  
  You can have the same community on different instances.
  For example !asklemmy@lemmy.world and !asklemmy@lemmy.ml

It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.

Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.
- Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
  Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
  
  How can we force this instance to federate with everyone though? If we centralize the discussion in a single place, we would put a lot of trust into maintainers of said instance. We can build "backup" instances for that purpose, but that would destroy the initial goal - to have a single discussion place.
  
  No, please. Most of the defederations are for a good reason. In !fediverse@whatever I want to read about fediverse, not racist bullshit and spam.
  
  An instance dedicated to the Fediverse would be the ideal solution.
  Lemmy in general could use a lot more instances centered around specific topics.

I think this is just another variant of FOMO. You don't need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that's it 🤷‍♂️
- I'm not sure it's FOMO. The main issue I see is that communication to the audience (in this case, everyone interested in the Fediverse) is either cumbersome for the poster, or lacking for the audience.
  I usually see people not knowing about some tool for Lemmy (link the instance link switcher or the account sync app) because it was posted on one community, and not the other they are following.
  
  I agree, trying to get used to Lemmy and the amount of shit posts and low quality content can be fatiguing. Compound that with servers limiting people who can create accounts (lemmy.ml for instance) and inconsistent features for filtering/blocking memes and shit post communities on servers you don't have an account on— it's hard to get used to the disorganized mess.
  Reddit thrived on consistent leadership within it's communities, if you didn't like one you could create another with clear access/visibility to the rest of the user base. If Reddit is an echo chamber, Lemmy seems to be doubly so.
  
  There will always be people not knowing anything about any topic in a large enough group.
  The poster is not responsible for the audience, just post whatever you feel like sharing and the audience will come or not.
  I know this sounds like platitudes, but it is really all just variants of FOMO.

Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.
I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
- Thank you for your feedback!

I'm subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it's a bit annoying. But it's also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don't, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
- Not sure what the point of this post is.
  I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
  This seems to be an issue we should probably discuss, as it may prevent growth of the platform if most of the new joiners face it.
  
  I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
  Not trying to be mean, but ... you're making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D
  In these other posts, a frequent answer is: Reddit isn't that much different. A popular example is /r/gaming or /r/games or whatever. Apparently there are multiple subs for the same topic, sometimes with little to no differences.
  Then some people object "but that's not the same, they have different names", to which others reply "on lemmy, the full name includes the instance, so we don't have same name communities here, either".
  I think, bottom line, the two platforms aren't very different in this regard. On both, users can create new subs/comms even if the exact same content already exists. And they do. Sometimes both survive, sometimes not. On both, users decide "with their feet".
  One relevant difference might be that in the Fediverse, redundancy actually has value. It protects against defederation, unstable servers, servers disappearing.
  I still see value in combining duplicates. When I see a new community popping up, and I know a very similar thing already exists, I might leave a note in the new community wether they might want to participate in the other community instead. Just in case they were not aware it exists.
  But aside from the Fediverse-specific reasons for duplicates, there are additional general reasons, which is why we see the same phenomenon on reddit. For example, people might dislike the moderation in the 'original'. Or one might allow bots, the other not.
  While this is my point of view ("it's a non-issue"), I also note it's a topic which is frequently brought up. Apparently, it's frequently seen as an issue. This may be rooted in perception (including the fact that reddit is monolithic, falsly leading to the misconception it would only have one sub for one topic, all while it still has plenty of redundant duplicates) and communication (I got the feeling the fediverse's federated structure is sometimes over-emphasized and creates more worries than necessary).
  We probably will get technical solutions like grouping on a user-view level. Maybe some apps already have that. GitHub issues exist.
  Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet. It is of course perfectly fine to address and re-address the topic. This might help consolidate similar communities. Personally, I think having a few redundant communities is healthy for the nature of the fediverse.

comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I find this to be more positive than negative. The tone of the entire comment section tends to be set by the first few comments meaning every post has a high risk of becoming it's own tiny echo chamber. Spreading comments across multiple communities makes it more likely that the discussion will explore different aspects of the topic and that different opinions on the topic will be explored.
- Also discussions on different instances may have different flavors: e.g., many .world users prefer to participate in local communities, while .ml is federated with beehaw and hexbear, so it's kinda have a wider reach within threadiverse. Communities on smaller instances may be predominately populated by users of said instance.

Why do you think you need to post twice? This is what happens.
- Because Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml have their own defederation lists, meaning that to reach everyone, you need to post twice.
  That's actually part of the issue I was detailing in my post.
  
  I don't think this matters. If they are defederated from an instance you post in, then they determined that they don't want to see what gets posted there. Why is it so important to reach everyone?
  (To be fair, I think you should be able to post the same thing 10 times if you really want to, I just wish the site I use had a feature that would just automatically pool all posts with identical headings or links into a single post, then treat it like a mini community/magazine.)

The way i handle this is to sub to the biggest community on a given topic i can find. The exception to this is if i find a smaller community that is more active.
- I just sub to them all, there's no limit like on reddit.
  
  The dups annoy me, otherwise i would.

I feel like it's more of a client issue than a Lemmy issue. We could imagine having clients that correctly support crossposting by having tabs for each comment section.
- Or alternatively, all the comments across them should be visible in-line in all communities.
  Either of these approaches gives the agency to users to only reply to one of the cross post and read all the opinions/thoughts on that post. At the same time, it maintains the federation philosophy by not taking a community about a topic down, if the instance fails.
  
  It would be very beneficial to have clients that support aggregating equivalent communities from multiple instances. When viewing a post from the aggregated community there could be a section at the top saying "Viewing comments from:" and then a dropdown to choose between "all instances", "lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml", etc. When viewing all comments, they would be in one combined feed, without the user needing to care about which underlying post holds the specific thread they're looking at.
  Similarly, when users post something to an aggregate community, they could select whether it's posted to all the included communities, only one, or some specific subset.

as lemmy grows and or stabilises some communities will get bigger and more mainstream

It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.
I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.
Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
- Part of beauty of federation is that you people see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
  Due to defederation policies, it is required to reach everyone.
  Hexbear, the 8th largest instance in the fediverse, cannot see fediverse@lemmy.world.
  People on Lemmy.world don't want to subscribe to fediverse@lemmy.ml because they want to boycott the Lemmy admins
  Audience fragmentation is real.

You are advocating for a single point of failure.
- More like a single point of discussion.
  As I said elsewhere, other communities can be kept as backup if the main one is unreachable or gets compromised.
  That's already what's happening with some communities on Lemmyworld anyway, moderators are moving them to other instances.

Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
- The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
  Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
  On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
  So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice.
  Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation.
  That's exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
  
  OK, so defederation causes the problem. Having a unique community cannot solve that. But I'll forgive you for posting twice, if that is the reason.

With all the defederation going on nowadays I'm happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn't participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.
- But that's the issue, it's not because there is another version of the community that exists on a different server that people will rediscuss there what they already talked about on the main community, especially with the current low number of users.
  You see beehaw users complaining about not having access to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works , because while there is !patientgamers@lemmy.world , it has two posts that are 2 months old
  
  But then the OPs solution of closing !patientgamers@lemmy.world and only allowing !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works still doesn't help the people on beehaw. What those users can do are 2 things:
  Post more interesting stuff to !patientgamers@lemmy.world so that it attracts other people
  Lobby for federation with sh.itjust.works on their server and deal with moderation

I envision what you're asking as kinda like IRC. Everyone on the same network (Lemmy) can join the same channel (community) and would be some sort of sync feature for when defederation/instance vanishes (netsplit) happens to re-sync everyone. This would require some sort of trust cert/key or something from each community that wanted to join the conjoined version, as well as to validate they are still the correct community and not a bad actor.
Not sure how moderation and communities that wanted to leave the whole would be handled though.
- You're not the first one bringing a technical analogy, someone else mentioned git with merge between instances that would be branches.
  Moderation is indeed the tricky part.

I think users should always join the biggest communities, to avoid replicating data and fragment communities.
If an instance is decommissioned, all of its communities are lost. It is mitigated by the fact that no single instance hosts all communities.
The design is not perfect but this is how ActivityPub is designed.
- I think users should always join the biggest communities, to avoid replicating data and fragment communities.
  I would suggest joining the most active, not the biggest. Some big communities may appear dead, while shine new ones be really active.
  Btw, may I ask why is your account marked as a bot?
  
  Is it better now ? (I'm not yet familiar with Jerboa)

Subscribing to a multireddit as a community being implemented and promoted as a default experience may solve it. Idk if it should be on Lemmy's or client's side, but different communities forming a community-verse that's subscribable with one tap is, for me, the next stage of fediverse. If they are federated and cache each other, it should be possible to form a united feed. Best case, if you can make just a link combining them into one, so it's easy to share. It would fulfill this task without multiposting.
Browsing porn, for once, doesn't really work for me. On Reddit, I did a multi of things I enjoy to combine them, and switch to it without changing accounts. Now I either browse All-feed of porno instance seeing things I'm not into or go to exact user or community. It's far from what I enjoyed previously. And autorepost bots don't help it too.
IDing and combining posts into one is not fixing the problem, but covering it under a rug. The best case is to eradicate the very need to post the same meme, article or nude into two communities and then ban spammy accs. At least that's what I wish for.

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
After this needless, patronizing comment I lost interest in discussing the subject with you.
- Sorry for that, but I got a few toxic comments in my last thread, and would like to avoid that here.
  Have a good one

100 comments