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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance's ability to fully control their own rules or "laws", where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
I think the problem with these analogies is that they're based on physical spaces, you wouldn't want to travel to another country or whatever daily because it takes time, if you had a portal to every other country then it would make more sense compared to here
You wouldn't want to traverse the border red-tape, that's my point.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
It really is terrible for building a community here, I've been trying to decide the best place to even start and it's so difficult to know where when most people won't be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there's the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from...
I think it's also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it's pushing away anyone that doesn't conform.
I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it's getting more closed.
Some of the issues, like multiple communities of the same subject were true of reddit in the beginning, and perhaps time will solve the issue, but your right in discovery being terrible. I still don't know what the Apple community is. Half the time using iOS the app fails to load search. Other times there doesn't appear to be many subscribers on any over any other. Subscribing to multiple just gives me the same topics over and over again. So I end up with a feed that doesn't refresh much and has many duplicates. Not a ton of discussion or self posts either.
Eh, IRC and Usenet were both federated systems that had a ton of technical issues when they kicked off that got fixed over time via protocol and code changes. I would guess that discoverability is probably one of the things that'll be improved -- right now, using the Lemmy Explorer is kind of an important tool for people using small instances.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I don't think that that's the end-all-be-all of discoverability, but it works well enough for me now.