So I notice that KBIN and BEEHAW and LEMMY all have duplicate pages dedicated to the same content. Are we as a community going to have to decide which page will be the ‘main’ page, will we have to subscribe to each magazine for each instance, or will they consolidate eventually?
So like, theres a technology@beehaw, a technology@lemmy, and a tech for kbin. Does it make sense to spend time cultivating one, if another ends up getting more attention?
I might be wrong, but I’ve noticed that right now, if you subscribe to a magazine, you subscribe to all subreddit-equivalents across instances with the same name. Let me tell you that subscribing to !random@kbin.social led to interesting stuff in my feed…
They’re not really “duplicate”. Each instance has it’s own magazines/communites/whatever, and those can have different rules, moderators, etc.
If you want to follow all of them, then follow all of them. If you only want one of them, then do one of them. Reddit had various subreddits all on the same topic, for instance /r/technology and /r/tech, and they had their own nuances, users, rules, etc. One might end up being more popular than the other for whatever reason.
Also keep in mind that they’re subject to rules/moderation/control of the instance they’re on. I’m using kbin.social, but if beehaw decides to do some weird thing or decide they no longer want a technology group, it’s basically out of my control. Whereas a technology group here on kbin.social wouldn’t be effected by beehaw’s stance for their instance as a whole.
I imagine people interested in a topic will just follow all the related groups unless there’s an issue with one of them.
Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.
In the real world I can’t even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.
The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren’t necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo’d into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.
Is there another way? We’re assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you’ll find one on a different instance…
I expect people will see there’s existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.
I thought it was kind of funky at first. But I do like the idea that if one of them turns into some reddit-like hellhole, there will most likely be something similar on another instance. It doesn’t take much to subscribe to multiple similar subs.
That’s fair. I just wanna be sure that i’m not sharing content that nobody is bothering to read because there’s a more popular instance somewhere that I’m unawares of
I suggest that you don’t worry very much about how many people read your posts, especially in early days. I’ve seen people super stressed about how they can’t make their posts on Mastodon go viral enough. The scale here will be smaller.
Would be great to be able to aggregate the similar pages in something like a multireddit.
100% agree. But we should never try to force things to “one.” There should never be just one community for a topic. That’s what Reddit is. “This is the videos subreddit, if you don’t like it you don’t have a choice.”
Good communities will rise. Bad communities will fall. Some communities will attract users because they’re big and have lots of members. Some communities will attract users because they’re small and friendly. Choice is good. Fixating on there only being “one” of anything is bad.
This gets into another problem. You’ll never reach the critical mass that reddit did by having almost everyone on the same page. You had experts from every field commenting on some articles. Loads of knowledge in one place. It would’ve been awesome to have something like that.
