As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
there were redundant communities on reddit, there are always redundant communities, we are in a phase where we will see more not less. This is not a huge issue overall, though it will be distressing to those who have become accustom to what 6 and 7 figure subs are like.
realistically, i dont think its the best idea to hand any one server the majoirty of any topic or content, you will end up with the same problems all over again. Instead I would want to see tagging and a way to integrate community content from multiple communities. Something as simple as being able to make a community that is just a subscription list of many communities and shows thier content will work.
People were promoting tagging on Reddit as early as 2008. They came up with subreddits which did about 50% of the work of tagging, but also allowed communities to stay distinct and establish their own cultures. I think the lack of tagging is what made Reddit so special, and I think Lemmy shouldn’t implement it either.
Regarding redundancy, I agree. I’m from Seattle, and people migrated from /r/Seattle to /r/SeattleWA to /r/seawa as the culture of each shifted. I can see something like that happening here.
I mean tagging posts and reddit had that, you no like?
Rather than make a node with 12 communities because i want to segment content i want to make a server with 1 community and tags. yes reddit called it “flair”
Oh I see what you’re saying. But yeah, I suspect one sub will take over the others. I don’t think there were too many instances of two subreddits on a topic with similar levels of activity.
its a natural consequence of groups, its a fallacy to expect a group to maintain its culture as it grows, inevitably the culture moves toward new means that excludes some portion of that group, this is where a lot of splinter communities come from.
There are also other reasons to, for example my AI community is mainly my shared list of links worth reading on the topic. Rather than keep it private I am sharing. I would not want to just drop these in an ocean as I can to refer back to a carefully curated list. On reddit I found at least 200 others that wanted the same for this topic. This kind of use is more akin to how reddit was used prior to comments, is still a valid use and will appear redundant to the uninitiated.
No it is rare to have 2 similarly sized instances, but that does not usually stop splinter communities from growing. When we look at a system like reddit and see the outward power the admins have becasue all the people are THERE, Im not sure we would want to be so ready to replicate it, there are other ways to get a lot of the same but with even better controls.
Don’t drive for centralization, drive for protocols and standards.
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Speaking of, it may help somewhat if there was a little more community encouragement to make somewhat distinct community names (where useful or relevant). Nothing hard-coded, but a general standard to help differentiate communities.
what are you thinking?
as of now we have the name and the instance its on. so you at least know its not your instance, most instances seem general, which I admit is confusing, I went for a topical server more like the old forums, I feel like this is going to be a better way to manage things since most people often spend years in thier topic areas and often want tighter and faster comms with that circle while they are engaged.
personally id like to see more portability of accounts and def better UI so people understand what they are dealing with.
Oh, good point. I’d been browsing local more here & other Lemmy instances, so forgot it does indicate the origin instance.
Generally I agree with the inclination towards more focused/topical servers, so then the sub-communities almost naturally set themselves apart as they focus on more specifics, e.g. Tech instance and sub-communities for specific types of hardware, software, etc. That said, I’d also appreciate better account portability, and UI.
General instances are kind of an odd thing for federated sites tbh, but they make sense as a sort of reception area/lobby for the rest of the space. Come to think of it, an interesting (if impractical) idea that may work better for this style (forum/link aggregator) may be the possibility of remote community creation, e.g. person from lemmy.world being able to create a community in a hypothetical tech.lemmy. Although that would necessitate a whole host of improved permissions to ensure folks can’t mess with each other.
this kind of delegation is done is SharePoint server with teams so I don’t see why it could not be implemented, but yes complexity!
I suspect the fediverse devs are going to get a bunch of PRs soon.