I may be just a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I think the duplicate communities thing will die down eventually. Natural selection will do it’s thing and we’ll all eventually settle in specific communities on specific instances.
Based on the nature of life itself all living things become specialized over time. This includes creatures, jobs, products, communities, etc. So what’s likely to happen is some communities will die out or be abandoned while others will thrive and yet others will simply become more specialized.
Hypothetical example: /m/gifs on Kbin might become the place to find perfect loops and high quality/serious stuff while /m/gifs on some other instance might become the place for animated silliness.
I think “duplicated” communities is a problem even on a centralized service, to a lesser degree, since you can create a community with same intentions, but different names (e.g. c/video, c/videos). I’m also optimistic they will sort out with time
Agree, the fragmentation of communities is a stumbling block for adoption and for the coalescing of users to solidified groups that adopt identities and cultures. This is a huge advantage when looking at centralized systems like reddit. My hope is that there will be some version of natural selection but that it occurs sooner than later
Even on reddit their were multiple subreddits that were very similar. r/oculus r/oculusquest r/quest2 r/virualreality and many more ar and xr subbreddits I was subscribed to. Much of the same content were on all of them.
As the user base here grows it won’t be an issue, some similar communities will be bigger some smaller and there’s room for everything.
Im not sure what you’re saying.
Personally I want to avoid one huge centralized “community” as it no longer ceases to be a community.
It makes sense to me that different userbases have different /r/funny with different content that they find funny. Otherwise you just have one appeal to the lowest common denominator content.
One thing I’m worried about here with the duplicated communities though is the same thing that was happening on Reddit in the last couple years, new astroturfed communities popping up with a decided slant. Like how /r/economy came out of nowhere despite /r/economics being an existing huge subreddit, and /r/economy having a noticeable conservative bent. Lemmy doesn’t seem a ton more susceptible to it than Reddit was, but discovering new popular communities does seem to be very much a desired feature here.
I don’t think Beehaw has it figured out, but the idea of making signups more onerous definitely makes sense to limit bots, advertisers, and state actors.
I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
The thing is, due to how federation works, this cannot work. Federation is not an automatic thing that happens to instances; instances can only know about other instances if they send a request to another instance or vice versa, to discover them.
The closest thing to a solution will always be things like https://browse.feddit.de, or some implementation of opt-in relays, like the microblogging platforms use.
I need to do some reading on how the fediverse works under the hood but if browse,feddit.de has visbility of all instances then certaintly there is a way for any instance that chooses to federate to have visibility into the fediverse
It doesn’t have visbility of all instances in existence, as this is impossible. What it will do is crawl the “known fediverse”, which is done by crawling known instances and then crawling known instances to those known instances, and so on.
Basically, the Fediverse is just separate websites talking to each other, there is no actual fediverse entity so to speak.
That makes sense, but I am failing to see the issue.
As long as one instance, or any single user from one instance makes that instance aware of the existence of another instance (currently by pasting the url of that instance in the community search), that is now visible and discoverable to all users.
Or worst case, your instance calls some aggregator, like browse.feddit.de to fetch all known instances.
All I am asking for a better UI for viewing content across these instances. What that looks like I am not totally sure. > Communities
I have to admit I’m not sure what you’re asking anymore, what exactly would a “better UI for viewing content across these instances” be? You can already search for communities that your instance knows about (and force it to search for any instances that you know elsewhere) using the search system, and browsing the All feed will show you all posts from communities/instances that your instance knows about as well. Trying searching gaming to see what I mean
I will say the search page feels incredibly disjointed though; I think it should group all the same content (communities, posts, comments) instead of whatever it does right now.
It sounds to me like you’re asking for some sort of discoverability/content recommendations, perhaps? If this is the case, the general Fediverse culture tends to be against this sort of stuff as they see them as systems that promote more screen time and unhealthy habits, instead of actually engaging with what you know you want to engage with.
I may be just a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I think the duplicate communities thing will die down eventually. Natural selection will do it’s thing and we’ll all eventually settle in specific communities on specific instances.
Based on the nature of life itself all living things become specialized over time. This includes creatures, jobs, products, communities, etc. So what’s likely to happen is some communities will die out or be abandoned while others will thrive and yet others will simply become more specialized.
Hypothetical example: /m/gifs on Kbin might become the place to find perfect loops and high quality/serious stuff while /m/gifs on some other instance might become the place for animated silliness.
I think “duplicated” communities is a problem even on a centralized service, to a lesser degree, since you can create a community with same intentions, but different names (e.g. c/video, c/videos). I’m also optimistic they will sort out with time
Agree, the fragmentation of communities is a stumbling block for adoption and for the coalescing of users to solidified groups that adopt identities and cultures. This is a huge advantage when looking at centralized systems like reddit. My hope is that there will be some version of natural selection but that it occurs sooner than later
Even on reddit their were multiple subreddits that were very similar. r/oculus r/oculusquest r/quest2 r/virualreality and many more ar and xr subbreddits I was subscribed to. Much of the same content were on all of them. As the user base here grows it won’t be an issue, some similar communities will be bigger some smaller and there’s room for everything.
Im not sure what you’re saying. Personally I want to avoid one huge centralized “community” as it no longer ceases to be a community.
It makes sense to me that different userbases have different /r/funny with different content that they find funny. Otherwise you just have one appeal to the lowest common denominator content.
One thing I’m worried about here with the duplicated communities though is the same thing that was happening on Reddit in the last couple years, new astroturfed communities popping up with a decided slant. Like how /r/economy came out of nowhere despite /r/economics being an existing huge subreddit, and /r/economy having a noticeable conservative bent. Lemmy doesn’t seem a ton more susceptible to it than Reddit was, but discovering new popular communities does seem to be very much a desired feature here.
I don’t think Beehaw has it figured out, but the idea of making signups more onerous definitely makes sense to limit bots, advertisers, and state actors.
There are plenty of duplicate communities on Reddit, it doesn’t really matter.
I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
The thing is, due to how federation works, this cannot work. Federation is not an automatic thing that happens to instances; instances can only know about other instances if they send a request to another instance or vice versa, to discover them.
The closest thing to a solution will always be things like https://browse.feddit.de, or some implementation of opt-in relays, like the microblogging platforms use.
I need to do some reading on how the fediverse works under the hood but if browse,feddit.de has visbility of all instances then certaintly there is a way for any instance that chooses to federate to have visibility into the fediverse
It doesn’t have visbility of all instances in existence, as this is impossible. What it will do is crawl the “known fediverse”, which is done by crawling known instances and then crawling known instances to those known instances, and so on.
Basically, the Fediverse is just separate websites talking to each other, there is no actual fediverse entity so to speak.
That makes sense, but I am failing to see the issue. As long as one instance, or any single user from one instance makes that instance aware of the existence of another instance (currently by pasting the url of that instance in the community search), that is now visible and discoverable to all users.
Or worst case, your instance calls some aggregator, like browse.feddit.de to fetch all known instances.
All I am asking for a better UI for viewing content across these instances. What that looks like I am not totally sure. > Communities
I mean if you look at https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1, you can already see a bunch of communities from other instances
I have to admit I’m not sure what you’re asking anymore, what exactly would a “better UI for viewing content across these instances” be? You can already search for communities that your instance knows about (and force it to search for any instances that you know elsewhere) using the search system, and browsing the All feed will show you all posts from communities/instances that your instance knows about as well. Trying searching gaming to see what I mean
I will say the search page feels incredibly disjointed though; I think it should group all the same content (communities, posts, comments) instead of whatever it does right now.
It sounds to me like you’re asking for some sort of discoverability/content recommendations, perhaps? If this is the case, the general Fediverse culture tends to be against this sort of stuff as they see them as systems that promote more screen time and unhealthy habits, instead of actually engaging with what you know you want to engage with.