We don’t need to beat reddit. We don’t need to beat anyone. There are no investors or shareholders. There are no stock listings. There are no ads or addictive algos. We are fine as we are now. There is no need for exponential growth. Lemmy should simply be.
We do need to continue growing at a natural but sustained rate. 50-60k is not a healthy place to stop and there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit development-wise.
A way to group sublemmys across instances could work
I think user side multi-communities whose definitions are easily shareable so that you can basically set up a bunch based on a curator’s or moderator’s recommendations … would do the trick nicely and be pretty achievable technically. Frankly, I feel they’ve been a long time coming and hope that they’re in the works already.
Possibly … but it’s been spoken about by the devs before, so it’s on their radar at least. It may have even come up in their AMA? I know a way of sorting that surfaces smaller communities definitely did come up and is definitely in the works.
Otherwise, I’m not sure you’re convincing me.
It seems to me that you have to start by establishing that “parallel” communities (ie different communities with similar or identical focus) here are worse than on reddit. Unless there’s a large amount of complex defederation going on, I don’t see how the decentralisation substantially worsens the effect the existence of parallel communities has on “engagement” compared to the situation over on Reddit. And, as far as I understand, such a large and complex defederation/federation network has not happened. The most significant example of defederation is probably the beehaw-lemmy.world defederation, where beehaw only has about 3% of lemmy’s active users.
So I’m not sure your two orders of dilution(many lemmy, many sublemmys) argument follows. THe 196 community over on blahaj seems like a good example, where it has 5 times as many active users as there local to the whole blahaj instance. the startrek.website is in a similar boat. Federation seems to be working fine. And while there are duplicate communities lying around, I don’t think that means that people aren’t naturally flocking to where they feel is the best place to be for things while allowing diversity to exist.
So, if parallel communities are fine, or even good (which is my take, at least to an extent), I’m not sure there’s a sufficient argument for the need to implement sub-federation on the backend. I’d bet it would be tricky and add a whole new kind of entity to sort out.
Comparatively, the multi-communities idea, I’d guess, is a much more natural extension as it’s really just allowing a user to have multiple sets of subscriptions, which is an already established process/feature.
Also, I’d wager that putting flexibility in the hands of users rather than community moderators is probably a better way to go.
I hear you. I appreciate you breaking down the conversation too!!
I guess I’d hope discovery could occur through wide spread multi-community suggestions, ideally posted in community sidebars too ( though that’s probably unlikely). I’d also hope the cross post interface gets better, with all cross posts listed (not just those that share a URL), and the ability to view all comments from all cross posts together (maybe with some options around whether you subscribe to them or not).
Beyond that, I’m still not sure we’re in a worse position than Reddit was, apart from currently having a small size?
it’ll probably happen in stages, with it first just being a list of communities, then maybe they can get a name and be shared with multiple users and you could follow them like a normal community
I don’t see any reason it would require a rewrite, currently a community is an Actor that Boosts the posts directed to it, a multi-community could also be an Actor that boosts any posts going into the communities/Actors that it follows
I think the best example of how to ‘lemmy’ properly, or in a way that doesn’t create ‘wasted votes’ (in the gerrymandering sense) of content, is the startrek lemmy. The focus on a niche topic and own it entirely. Theres no point in having lemmy subcommunities based on startrek because the startrek lemmy is so great and makes such great content.
I found this paragraph pretty confusing, probably because of uncommon terminology.
With “the startrek lemmy” you refer to one specific instance? Which? ‘Lemmy’ is commonly used to refer to the platform, or the software.
“lemmy subcommunities” refers to communities? Like https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse? Later you use the word “sublemmys”. Does that refer to the same thing, a community?
Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.
Another line of division is the bot question. Are bots allowed to make new posts? Are bots allowed to make new comments?
What’s the moderation style?
People are diverse. A one-size-fits-all-solution will likely leave some demands unsatisfied. If that portion is big enough, it justifies redundant communities. And there are many more reasons to possibly see redundancy as a good thing.
People who like a centralized approach can flock to the biggest instance or community, and others can do their thing. Both can coexist. What would be nice to have is view-grouping of communities, from the reader’s perspective.
While I agree that we don’t need to “beat” anything or strive for growth, I do think those things will happen naturally if the system is an improvement. And while lemmy’s potential is great, there are challenges that come with federation, like those mentioned above. And those problems should be solved in time. Not to generate growth but to improve the system. Growth may follow
We don’t need to beat reddit. We don’t need to beat anyone. There are no investors or shareholders. There are no stock listings. There are no ads or addictive algos. We are fine as we are now. There is no need for exponential growth. Lemmy should simply be.
We do need to continue growing at a natural but sustained rate. 50-60k is not a healthy place to stop and there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit development-wise.
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I think user side multi-communities whose definitions are easily shareable so that you can basically set up a bunch based on a curator’s or moderator’s recommendations … would do the trick nicely and be pretty achievable technically. Frankly, I feel they’ve been a long time coming and hope that they’re in the works already.
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Possibly … but it’s been spoken about by the devs before, so it’s on their radar at least. It may have even come up in their AMA? I know a way of sorting that surfaces smaller communities definitely did come up and is definitely in the works.
Otherwise, I’m not sure you’re convincing me.
It seems to me that you have to start by establishing that “parallel” communities (ie different communities with similar or identical focus) here are worse than on reddit. Unless there’s a large amount of complex defederation going on, I don’t see how the decentralisation substantially worsens the effect the existence of parallel communities has on “engagement” compared to the situation over on Reddit. And, as far as I understand, such a large and complex defederation/federation network has not happened. The most significant example of defederation is probably the
beehaw-lemmy.worlddefederation, where beehaw only has about 3% of lemmy’s active users.So I’m not sure your
two orders of dilution (many lemmy, many sublemmys)argument follows. THe196community over onblahajseems like a good example, where it has 5 times as many active users as there local to the whole blahaj instance. thestartrek.websiteis in a similar boat. Federation seems to be working fine. And while there are duplicate communities lying around, I don’t think that means that people aren’t naturally flocking to where they feel is the best place to be for things while allowing diversity to exist.So, if parallel communities are fine, or even good (which is my take, at least to an extent), I’m not sure there’s a sufficient argument for the need to implement sub-federation on the backend. I’d bet it would be tricky and add a whole new kind of entity to sort out.
Comparatively, the multi-communities idea, I’d guess, is a much more natural extension as it’s really just allowing a user to have multiple sets of subscriptions, which is an already established process/feature.
Also, I’d wager that putting flexibility in the hands of users rather than community moderators is probably a better way to go.
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I hear you. I appreciate you breaking down the conversation too!!
I guess I’d hope discovery could occur through wide spread multi-community suggestions, ideally posted in community sidebars too ( though that’s probably unlikely). I’d also hope the cross post interface gets better, with all cross posts listed (not just those that share a URL), and the ability to view all comments from all cross posts together (maybe with some options around whether you subscribe to them or not).
Beyond that, I’m still not sure we’re in a worse position than Reddit was, apart from currently having a small size?
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These things absolutely can be fixed in an update but I think we both know the devs have no intention of going in that direction.
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there’s a github issue for this
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
it’ll probably happen in stages, with it first just being a list of communities, then maybe they can get a name and be shared with multiple users and you could follow them like a normal community
I don’t see any reason it would require a rewrite, currently a community is an Actor that Boosts the posts directed to it, a multi-community could also be an Actor that boosts any posts going into the communities/Actors that it follows
I found this paragraph pretty confusing, probably because of uncommon terminology.
With “the startrek lemmy” you refer to one specific instance? Which? ‘Lemmy’ is commonly used to refer to the platform, or the software.
“lemmy subcommunities” refers to communities? Like https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse? Later you use the word “sublemmys”. Does that refer to the same thing, a community?
Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.
Another line of division is the bot question. Are bots allowed to make new posts? Are bots allowed to make new comments?
What’s the moderation style?
People are diverse. A one-size-fits-all-solution will likely leave some demands unsatisfied. If that portion is big enough, it justifies redundant communities. And there are many more reasons to possibly see redundancy as a good thing.
People who like a centralized approach can flock to the biggest instance or community, and others can do their thing. Both can coexist. What would be nice to have is view-grouping of communities, from the reader’s perspective.
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What’s wrong with Usenet? Sure there’s not a ton of users, but that’s a good thing.
While I agree that we don’t need to “beat” anything or strive for growth, I do think those things will happen naturally if the system is an improvement. And while lemmy’s potential is great, there are challenges that come with federation, like those mentioned above. And those problems should be solved in time. Not to generate growth but to improve the system. Growth may follow