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Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
(popcar.bearblog.dev)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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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.
So when people vote according to what you prefer, it's validation of the problem. When they don't, it's "insanely toxic and dismissive". Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?
This is a type of "faster horse" case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in "centralized system" mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.
Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.
To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.
Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn't enough people interested.
What would help is that people stopped trying to find a "canonical place" to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it's been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.
Today I learned about this community, seems interesting
There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.
You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.
I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.
Number of users is pretty similar in my experience, with an average difference between 2 and 10 users.
Cool. I'm glad you're getting a fairly smooth experience, but that hasn't been my experience or others'. I've seen posts with only a few comments but on their home server they have whole comment trees that I didn't see. Vote counts can be around 10-20 on one server and greater than 100 on another.
The few last weeks were rough because of the 19.1 mess.
Federation should be working smoothly from now on.
Again: so what? It's reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.
You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn't bother me, and I truly don't understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.
Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls "Thinking in Words". If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it's easy to coordinate a move away.
It's a huge problem with the platform which you choose to ignore by saying "so what". It's impossible to refute someone who digs in their heels and says "so what" to everything and not seeing the problem.
There is a difference between "not seeing the problem" and "asking yourself what are the implications of it". I'm running 15+ instances and I'm running a website that is devoted to help people find the "canonical" community in the fediverse. I can point to dozens of other issues that are a lot more "painful" to me as an user and an instance admin, none of them are related with the "pain of having to choose which community to join or focus".
I'm again going to ask: is there any actual, practical example of this being such a "huge issue"?
And yet people want a better solution and are asking for it. And the only response you, an owned of 15+ instances, and an admin of a website that helps people find instances, can make is "deal with it it's meant to be hard". It's a huge usability problem, it's funny that you don't see it. Consider this my last reply to you.
You repeated the accusation of "not seeing it", misinterpreted what I am saying as "deal with it, it's meant to be hard" when I am actually saying the exact opposite (It does not require a lot of work to figure out "organically" and it is not hard to workaround the issue) and when asked repeatedly for actual instances of this being "a huge usability issue", you run away with some pretentious posturing. That's just lame.
It's the Linux mindset, the pain is the point.
Bruh we just don't do the addiction painkillers of corporate. Doesn't mean at all that the pain is the point.
The pain is the point. The fediverse expects you to know the right answer, and go through the pain of figuring it out. It could make changes to make finding the answer easier, but new usersare expected to suffer just like existing ones have.
It's the same with Linux, you have to know a handful of quirks that could be eliminated, but doing so provides 0 benefits to existing users. No one cares about letting new users have an easier time than they did.
Yeah I have seen this plenty in open source. It's like people don't want other people to use their software, or they forget a regular user isn't tech savy and they just want to talk about their hobby, not look around in 50 places seeing where to post.
In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.
It's not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven't seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.
Cool. It doesn't bother you. Then just keep doing what you're doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won't care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don't care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?
This isn't about maximizing reach of our posts. It's about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.
Great, so let's talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.
But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.
Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.
Why? That's a pretty big assumption to think a significant share of people will default to create a new community, when the most likely scenario is that they will browse around their own instance to find out what is already here.
Even in the most extreme cases, we have 4-5 "repeated" communities and they all eventually consolidated into one.
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:
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.
You don't think there's anything on your end that can be improved? You don't think you can do better?
Always, but how is this related to the discussion at hand?
Do you think that if my responses were more tactful, OP would change his mind or at least give some thought about their own (passive-)aggressiveness on the post?
Without a doubt in my mind, yes. You would have that effect on the OP. But not just OP, everyone else reading as well.
If that is true, then why hasn't OP responded well to the other more tactful responses?