- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fedigrow@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fedigrow@lemm.ee
I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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I think Lemmy needs to work on the basics first. I made a post on a .world community from a .dbzer0 account and it got several upvotes and comments. When I look at it from the account I posted it with, it has 0 upvotes and 0 comments.
Should be fixed by now with version 19.2 and 19.3
There are multiple communities?! So what?? “Oh my God, I don’t know which one to write!” So what?
This is the type of nerd-sniping “problem” that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.
Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.
No, it’s not always obvious which is the “main” community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.
It’s not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It’s social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can’t feel it because it doesn’t directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.
I’d also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy’s github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.
Why can you never make your point without being combative and off-putting? I’ve seen you do this many times. I communicate with very helpful and enthusiastic people who have blocked you or warn others from engaging with you because of your abrasive comments.
Too much time living in Germany, sorry. ;)
Seriously, though… Look at the submission:
- it starts with a coward’s version of an imperative (“needs to fix”) in the title. Look around and you will see plenty of cases of people using this phrasing when they want to give an ultimatum but don’t have the means/authority to back it up with a credible threat.
- It goes on to describe the “problem” but stays in the abstract, without ever giving a real example of its consequences or why it should be so important. IOW, it wants to get other people to worry about something that haven’t affected them in a meaningful way.
- The most annoying thing of all: the author sees a problem, describes all of the possible solutions, but stays away from showing work done on any of them.
I have all the patience in the world when someone starts an argument from the position of a learner, trying to understand the situation and willing to accept that they are the ones that need to adapt to something new. But when someone starts arguing already from the position of unearned authority (like the title) and wants to turn “their” problem into other people’s work, then yes I will respond in this abrasive way.
I personally don’t think this is a huge issue, but it is an issue. I usually pick the biggest community on a topic, or if there are multiple that are fairly active, subscribe to both/all. The only real complaint I have about it is that users will often make the same post to both communities, so I see duplicate posts on my timeline and the discussion is split in half.
I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances, in a way that they would appear as a single community to users. I don’t know how that would be implemented though.
I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances,
If they are willing to cooperate that far, they could as well merge the communities
That’s true. I guess I like the idea of being able to distribute a community across servers, but it may be more trouble than it’s worth to implement.
And then the users who were in the moved-from server but are defederated from the moved-to server get automatically banne d/ blocked from it.
Thanks but no thanks. Sharing is the solution, not merging. Merging is the solution that corporate sells for every problem.
As someone used to Old Internet: how is having multiple communities for similar topics a ‘problem’? If you like Overwatch, do you demand that Activision, Steam, and GameFAQs all combine their forums about it? If you like baking, do you demand that all of the hundreds of sites dedicated to it all blob into one? This seems like a very wierd idea to be so definite about.
People are pushing for it because they see the amount of people here as a finite number that shouldn’t be spread too thin.
I’m more on the side advocating to get more people here so that we don’t worry about how many communities we have on the same topic
It’s not a problem. It’s a great feature. Because there’s more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you’re free to do so. But I’m also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.
It’s always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they’re brainless and they just think of Lemmy as “the new Reddit” (or Mastodon as “the new Twitter”).
To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.
I appreciate the effort, but what is happening is option 1, aka merging of communities, naturally.
About knowing where to post, you can usually have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities, search the community name, and have a good idea of which one is the most active.
Sometimes different communities can coexist, and that’s fine. !science@mander.xyz and !science@lemmy.world have different audiences, and that’s okay.
I’ve already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it’s good that the badness of that “solution” is acknowledged.
As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that’s what webrings are for! Let’s bring them back from the '90s. Basically get’s give the power of “static search” back to the users.
Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I’m wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I’m mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.
The real problem is how do we centralize all communities. I mean, there’s a Linux community on lemmy.world, but also Linux Web sites, forums, chat rooms, people on Twitter that post about Linux. Sometimes people talk about Linux in emails, or text messages. They’re probably having in person conversations about Linux. This fragmentation is ruining things.
No. We tried having it centralized and it sucks.
You didn’t read the post. The suggestion is to make the platform more decentralized not centralized. I’m not even going to reply to most comments in this thread that also, clearly, did not read the post and is making stuff up.
