Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.
The underlying problem here is the lemmy community being spread out across many instances, and this solution doesn’t really fix the underlying problem.
This is just speculation, but I think eventually 1-4 instances will grow much bigger than the rest. I think when this happens, communities will become much less fragmented and the problem will solve itself.
tl;dr while this is a good idea, I think if we just leave everything the way it is the problem will solve itself.
Isn’t a few large communities eating up the others like the opposite of what Lemmy is trying to do?
i keep hearing people call for this like its going to happen and be the only way things will be. Look at reddit, look at the history of some of these subs.
there will always be multiple copies of various communities. what software gives us the ability to do is sort and filter and tag (we need to add this) to our hearts content so instance admins and users have control over what comes across thier feeds.
Joined communities will have many of the same centralization problems reddit has now. I’ve seen this call mostly from users who were on reddit long after it was large. It seems many have no idea that almost every topic on reddit has 4-6 subs around it usually.
If people are satisfied with them, I think that’s OK, and more efficient than having a zillion.
Problems will happen if we go too low, and bigger instances start de-federating. Some might be tempted to start monetizing like Reddit.
I think it’s only a problem if it congregates to 1 instead of 4 or so. If one of the 4 goes rogue or disappointing its users, people can easily just jump on a different one. Most servers will suck and that’s ok. Good ones will attract users.
The example of federation most people have experience with is email. There will almost certainly be gmails and yahoos emerging over time, but they will have limited control compared to reddit, because if you don’t like the filtering/advertizing/whatever of one you’re free to leave for another
The email analogy breaks down when you consider that most email servers are run by big tech and cost a lot of money to upkeep
Or you can run your own email server for yourself and a few of your family.
There’s almost nothing in between gmail and some random person’s self hosted email server.
In terms of the fediverse,who the heck is willing to host a lemmy server for 1 million complete strangers? Not many people i think
If Lemmy takes off I wouldn’t be at all surprised if tech companies hosted instances that they monetize through advertising, and many people would be willing to have a home instance that showed them ads in exchange for high stability and potentially more user-friendly clients
They’d still have to release the source for their modded versions with ads, thus, ads can be mitigated from the instance client/app side.
Not necessarily, there are several ways they could release a proprietary app: either code it from scratch so they own the copyright, use OSS code that has a commercial-friendly license (eg. MIT), use an OSS library that allows them to link with their proprietary code (eg. LGPL).
But even if they did release the source code, I think they could still be profitable. Their main customers would be people who want something that “just works”, and a lot of those people would rather see a few ads than deal with downloading a modified version of the official client. People who hate ads and are willing to tinker are more likely to run their own insurance, IMO.
They’d still have to use the Lemmy API, thus, recognizing ads and/or reversing code should be fairly easy (when you actually know how everything communicates).
Just as a side note (am kinda curious to be honest) I always ran the official Reddit app (don’t mod anything, so… didn’t see the point in using 3rd party apps) and I never EVER saw a single ad in the app. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in the US, IDK, but would like to hear an explanation as to why ads weren’t served on my client… not that it bothered me, lol 😂.
I don’t think it’ll ever be perfect either. The setup Lemmy has just means it’ll be more resilient to breaking down entirely because there’s no single point of failure. So yeah hopefully it stabilizes more over time.
The goal of implementing this feature is to leverage the benefits of federation. If we wait until there is only a few big communities, the purpose of having federation becomes irrelevant. When an instance hosting one of those large communities shuts down, the community would have to migrate to the next major community.
By proactively implementing this feature, Lemmy can harness the advantages of federation while actively mitigating the challenges posed by community fragmentation and echo chambers. It provides a centralized hub that encourages cross-pollination of ideas, fosters community engagement, and ensures that valuable content is accessible to all users, regardless of the size or popularity of individual communities.
I disagree on two points:
- Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Echo chambers will always exist, but fragmentation is what keeps them contained to small pockets.
- A centralized hub would not necessarily foster community engagement. Seeing hundreds of comments on a post is often enough of a barrier.
see I’m not sure I see that as a problem. There are lots of reasons to spawn a new but similar community (bad community mods, bad server admins). There are lots of subreddits I avoided because they were just too big to get into any real info or discussion, just the same beginner questions asked over and over again.
The proposal does not necessarily imply merging all small communities with others. The implementation can provide an optional choice to community moderators, allowing them to decide whether they want their community to be included in the multireddit. This approach respects the autonomy of individual communities and acknowledges the reasons why new but similar communities may emerge, such as issues with community mods or server admins. By offering this flexibility, the feature can cater to the diverse needs and preferences of different communities while still providing the benefits of consolidating posts from communities with similar topics.
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From what I understand: Yes, because the users commenting could easily be from different instances
I honestly wouldn’t want that, a feature like multi-reddit would be much better IMO.
I personally don’t want to be “automatically” subscribed to all tech communities for example just because I joined one, nor I want to be flood by an immense feed because all communities of the same type are put all together, that takes away individual choices IMO.
We had exactly the same problem on reddit, but multi-reddit solved that very well by leaving the choice to individuals instead of being forced by admins.
EDIT: for those who don’t know, multi-reddit is a reddit feature that allows you to create different “labels” into which you can combine different subreddits, which label to create and which subs to combine is totally a user choice, those labels become “tabs” into your UI that you can use as they were individual subs.
So for example, I can create a label/tab called “linux” and use it to combine r/linux + r/linuxmx + r/xfce, etc., than I can create another label called “games” and combine r/MMORPG + r/wow + r/guildwars2, etc., and so on.
multi-reddits can be private, that is only the user who created them can see them, or they can be made public, so if some user doesn’t want to create their own, they can use multis created by other people.
join a meme sub
get joined to 15 meme subs
every meme is posted 15 times
surprised pikachu face
15 surprised pikachu faces
ftfy
I like this idea, however it would need to be intuitive to use and clearly advertised as a feature with a plain explanation up front. I say this because I’d never heard of this feature before and I used reddit for over 15 years (had to Google how it worked after seeing your comment).
Yes, users need ofc explanations, but that can be easily done, as much as people here are trying their best now to explain people the fediverse, that is quite more difficult to grasp IMO than a multi-reddit feature.
I like this idea better, also it shouldn’t be as hard to implement?
I am in this picture and I don’t like it. Lmao I literally had a multi-reddit called Linux.
Exactly. Just because I join a US politics sub doesn’t mean I want to join all US politics subs. The fact they are separate means I can find one that fits me. If this was reddit, joining /r/moderatepolitics would automatically sub you to /r/politics. Fuck that.
I read on another post in a different community that some servers have neo-nazis running them? If that is the case, no thanks, I don’t want that.
It’s possible, it’s one of the downsides of being federated. The instances are moderated independendently, there is no central authority that enforces law or morals. It’s great to avoid things like what happened to Reddit, but stuff like that can and will show up. You can always block instances to avoid seeing them, if you want.
How does one block an instance as a user? I thought only instances can block other instances.
Seconding this, I keep coming across Portuguese things and I don’t speak Portuguese.
Maybe this is your sign to learn Portuguese…
Mas não conheço ninguém que fale português para conversar. Se eu quisesse aprender um idioma, deveria escolher um local para realmente usá-lo.
Holy shit that was fast. I didn’t know Lemmy had a language extension feature.
My bad, I meant community. You can block communities individually. For blocking instances as a user there’s an open issue on Lemmy’s GitHub, but I believe it’s not going to be implemented anytime soon.
They don’t care what you want…
Actual neo-nazis or people you disagree with?
We have the real deal in my state.
That’s easy to block those individual instances if needed (assuming they exist).
How do you block an instance as a user? I know how to block a community from an instance, and i know an instance owner can defederate another instance, but how do I as a user block a whole instance?
I think it would be really nice to have a “fediverse map” for each server, to show where they’re connected to and what instances are endorsed back.
Would make finding new servers/communities easier too
There is a list of federated and blocked instances on the bottom of the page. https://latte.isnot.coffee/instances
Also this script is to see which instances block or are blocked by the instance you choose.
Why not make this purely client-side? Give me the option to merge what I see as like-minded feeds into one feed. Label it and be able to scroll it as one feed. All without the need for admins or instances to do more work?
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I got a few ideas:
-
Let people make their own multi-communities, then publish them. The multis would get a separate category in search.
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Let community moderators decide to join a list. For example:
- community@a and community@b exist.
- mod@a starts multi-community@a
- mod@b requests for community@b to join that multi
- mod@a accepts
- multi-community@a is now a shared feed of both communities.
This is what the old Star Trek subreddits seem to be trying to do over here. I believe r/StarTrek, r/DaystromInstitute, and r/Risa have combined into Star Trek here.
-
Damn, this is a lot of discussion and I don’t see a single person actually volunteering to actually go code the feature. It’s open source, you know? If anyone cares about the feature, go learn rust (like I’m trying to do now) and code it up.
EDIT: In case anyone reads this, please look at entitlement in open source. It’s an eye-opening read for those not familiar with the headaches involved.
“An ounce of planning is worth a pound of cure.”
Nothing wrong with rushing into projects when you’re learning a new language, but on big OSS projects it’s a good idea to make sure you’re working on something that the maintainers are willing to merge. Getting community consensus is a good thing.
I’m honestly more confused than I was before. With so many opinions, I don’t know how this could ever be implemented in a way that satisfies people.
It’ll be solved the same way anything gets solved in open source: those that can code make the final decisions.
I tend to agree with your take on this. I’m getting serious FOMO over here and over-subscribing because I don’t know which sub will be the one to “take off.”
should understand lemmy.world is just a backwater refugee camp. fediverse is much more https://fediverse.observer/map this map needs an update https://fediverse.party/
Hmm, I don’t disagree with the fragmentation but that’s the nature of any new social platform. It’s also been proven out that eventually one or two communities for a topic will become the dominant one with the others falling into disuse.
Attempting to merge communities early or artificially will cause moderator strife as minor disagreements balloon. Especially in a multireddit community where no one mod(team) has absolute control.
I don’t have a reason from a technical point of view, but from a social one. Forcing communities and instances together early will only cause strife. After a few years where two communities have a track record and proven ‘behavior’ would the multireddit not cause issue.
Another day another “When will the thing not meant to be Reddit be Reddit” post
I think you perfectly described my issues with comment sections on Reddit for the last few years. That attempt to appeal to an audience rather than further the discussion.
I used to love comment sections as much as, if not more than, the actual post on Reddit. It felt more like a conversation that had insight and humor. It got too big for it’s britches and became that soulless monolith.
I get an almost nostalgic vibe from this place. It’s nice.
Well, it’s the nature of almost any online community. Say the ‘popular’ thing and you’re lauded, even if a slightly less popular point is more valid / has better evidence.
There really is no good way to discourage this other than fostering a community which values the discourse over ‘popular’ thing. That’s difficult to do even offline.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to discourage it really. If you have any sort of user-user engagement system, whether up/downvotes or comments/shares or whatever, you’re going to have particular sentiments that are popular with particular audiences and get more of that engagement. If you take those features out, you’re going to lose engagement, pretty much definitionally.
I’ve always thought about creating some metric to weight users who create comments with the most engagement as higher. That leads to the most controversial or dividing comments rising though.
Some impartial judgement via mod points and or community awards to weigh valuable users would be nice.
The issue is any of these would be gamed, it might be possible today to use an AI model like ChatGPT but that’s got its own biases.
So for the moment I can’t think of a better system than upvote downvote.
Yeah, weighting ‘engagement’ higher is basically the youtube algorithm problem: you’d be attracting trolls most of all. You could probably devise something smarter, like weighting it to include all of most upvotes, fewest downvotes, and most comments; adding comments to it helps identify people who post positive but engaging things, but again that can lead to an echo chamber. Plus, it then under-weights new users compared to established ones, which can be unfortunate.
Yep. It turns out there is no such thing as a ‘balanced’ social network.
Which is analogous to life, depressingly enough.
I absolutely agree with you on this point. Comments used to be about commenting and carrying a conversation. Then they suddenly became monetized and sought after for the likes. Funny overrode useful and now comments are a trash fire that make one think twice before starting to engage with it.
The amount of times I’ve had to scroll and scroll for answers is way too high. Everyone thinks they’re a comedian and that’s always the top comment. So frustrating.
I would kill to just have some help/pointers figuring out how to navigate this… Fediverse?
I’ve made a couple posts, on one, maybe two, um, Instances? In the communities there?
I don’t know. All this change is coming at like, the WORST time in my personal/professional life and learning a whole new world is just… Daunting. (waahhhhhh 😭)
I’m new too, but here’s what I’ve learned in the last week:
You’re a user of and logged into @beehaw.org. This post (and the community it was posted to) exists on the @lemmy.world instance. You can see and post to it from your beehaw.org instance, because @lemmy.world also exists in the Fediverse.
My instance is @lemmy.world, so this community/post is “local” to my instance, but in practice that’s not super important. All that tells you is where I enter the fediverse, from there we’re able to see and post in communities from across instances. For example, I can see communities/posts from @beehaw.org, where you are. I am subbed to a few communities there.
It’s possible that a community like /c/games exists on @beehaw.org and on @lemmy.world. You would see them as games@beehaw.org and games@lemmy.world, and they are separate communities (despite having the same community name) so you can sub to one or both. OP is basically suggesting a feature to group (for example) games@beehaw.org and games@lemmy.world so that it just looks like one big community.
More experienced Lemmy and Fediversers, please correct any errors I may have made it this post!
Whatever y’all decide, please just remember what McLuhan said: “The medium is the message.” What’s the message implicit in your decision? Be deliberate.
How will this help the posters reach the fragmented communities? Will they just pray that everyone is using the the aggregator?
