Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?
This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.
I don’t think people know (how end-users will cope with the distributed choices of Lemmy). Reddit 2023 is nothing at all like Lemmy. One could be considered a household name for regular users of the Internet, the other a return to something more like FidoNet.
I come from the BBS days of the early 1980’s and even social media radio before that. I come from IRL user group meetings, held at public library and after-hours company meeting rooms. It has always bothered me that current-day subreddits have mostly no identity to the moderators and that moderation is often behind the scenes.
I guess it’s like “corporate experience” that people expect this day in society… that you can walk into a generic franchise chain bar and grill and not really care who the owner/operator and bouncers are of your hangout. Anyone can start a topic/ conversation and there is just some anonymous janitorial crew who is supposed to clean up the overflowing mess if (non-venue) spam or hate messages enter into the space.
The mechanisms of who pays for the venue and the moderators also was a topic most people never bothered to think about. Like it was some taxpayer-funded city park and perhaps the admin police might spot check if anyone was causing a tragedy in that there commons. But reality is that it was a profit-seeking venue charging a cover charge in the form of selling copies of your contribution and changing the tone of your meeting space by controlling the jukebox that visitors hear in terms of advertising messages inserted into the conversation space.
Lemmy seems small, owner/operator focused, and you get a sense that each instance is like some small bar and grill where you can come and meet some strangers or friends to discuss some topics under house rules. Your tips help pay for the hosting and the jukebox isn’t piped in memes from advertisers.
I remember when Reddit had known owners with known ideals, but that was very long ago. I’ve found making it big (with the associated wealth) changes people. One owner even committed suicide over his society ideals about sharing information. Ultimately I feel like a lack of topic participation by the moderators and owners alike made people thoughtless as to their own role in building a human community and people often felt like they were fighting machines and code.
sorry if this meandered off topic, but lately I’ve had some long-time friends ask me 'what is Reddit" since it is in the news lately, and I find it hard to explain what Reddit used to be (before new Reddit and the addition of images/video) vs. the corporate-like entity we know today that our contributions and participation helped empower over the past 17 years. I’ve used it mostly daily for all that time, and I have been unhappy with society’s dehumanizing direction for too many years.
/ramble from a disturbed mind.
This is a great analogy, well explained.
I hear you man. I went from active contributor to mostly lurking on Reddit, and it wasn’t even a conscious choice. Gradually, everything became very mechanistic. I knew what the top few comments would be before going to the comments. The churn became cyclic in nature.
After just a few days here, it was actually a little disconcerting how antagonistic and hostile people there are in the comments section. That’s just how people communicate, on a hair-trigger from flamewar.
I recognize your username, I saw what you wrote about SQL scaling. Can you imagine recognizing a username in a major subreddit in the reddit of today?
The dichotomy between the big communities which people subscribe to from all over Lemmy and the small meta/announcement/server issue communities for each individual instance is gonna be interesting to see develop as the userbase increases. Kinda like the difference between seeing people from your street everyday, then many more less familiar people in the city center.
I agree with what both of you are saying about the antagonism of the community writ large, but I am going to miss the small subs. There are dozens of them I subbed that have 500 or 1k users and are really tightly focused communities. They still have that feel from 2010ish reddit.
I’m ready to close the book on reddit as a whole, but I really will miss r/heavyseas and r/obscuremedia and r/theocho and r/desirepath etc.
It would be nice if the instances could essentially federate themselves across instances. If two communities agree, they could both combine and show the posts from one another’s feeds, without sacrificing their autonomy. This way if you are subscribed to once instance’s community, you could see content from a much larger super community.
Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
There are plenty of subs that have branched off due to corrupt mods and other things.
/r/meirl and /r/me_irl
/r/web_design and /r/webdesign (merged now, though)
/r/gaming, /r/truegaming
but I do agree with you. It definitely hurts to have communities fragmented. Especially if new users don’t understand how to view or subscribe to communities outside their instance, they may never see the more popular community on a different instance.
I think changing the default view for content and communities would help. Branching off is one thing and there may be a valid reason for the split. However, I wonder how many current duplicates are accidental. The current setup for Lemmy is to view Local communities by default. An intentional creation of a separate community for a reason is one thing.
Fragmentation of the communities will probably end up happening with time but I don’t know that it’s best to have things fragment early on when communities and those identities are still, in some cases, in the early stages of development.
Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
This premise on which your question is based isn’t actually true though. There’s
/r/technologyand also/r/tech. There’s/r/DnDand also/r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.I feel like what you’re observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a “winner” sub with more participation because… unless there’s a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.
Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries… and over time you’ll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.
I thank you for your response, and generally think you are right. Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit to: is the existence of multiple communities on a given subject a feature of Lemmy (perhaps even unique to Lemmy) we should expect and embrace, or do you think communities coalescing into few/one will occur naturally?
Not the person you asked but personally I do think it’ll naturally happen that we just end up glomming together into certain communities. That’s how it tends to go with any such thing. But one slightly overlooked benefit is that splinter communities can have the same name. No passive-agressive “/c/thetopic”, “/c/realthetopic”, “/c/betterthetopic”, “/c/thetopicwithouttoxicmods” etc etc etc.
Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?
Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?
Nope! That’s why community names are often formatted like
community@website. As many instances can use the same community name as they like, everyone can see and individually interact with each of them. Even if two communities are both namedtech, they are still distinct from one another by the website that’s hosting them.
My way of dealing with it is to subscribe to all instances of the community so I don’t miss anything. If I feel ownership of the community, I would encourage others in the community to do the same.
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That was my first thought as well. There are often a couple huge subs about variations of a topic, then a constellation of smaller subs about more niche aspects of that topic, or circlejerk versions. People naturally gravitate towards the largest one and swerve away from it if the mods go crazy or if it gets brigaded.
Nature finds a way. I sub all of them and then I unsub if I get too many duplicates.
No, the one on Lemmy.ml will win, since that’s the first place new users are going.
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I read strange stuff about beehaw, the admin going primadonna or somethin’…
I noped out of Beehaw when I read this. Those bolded parts(and only the bolded parts) raised some alarm bells in my brain.
The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We’ve all experienced someone who’s a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I’m not sexist, they’ll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap.
I think many people today would agree that someone ‘debating’ the benefits of phrenology in the open would constitute racist behavior, but there was a time and place in the world where it was considered real science, despite many scientists distancing themselves from this field very early on and critics writing scathing commentaries on this emerging field. This same guise of civility is frequently exercised by bigots, with modern examples of sexism, homophobia and transphobia being easily found on nearly any major social media platform.
Humans are pretty good at figuring out when someone is being a dick online, even if they are acting within the defined rules, and one solution to this problem is to recenter humans in our online social platforms. The idea of not having a ton of explicit rules, and instead having simple rules like “Be(e) nice” is a startling one for most, because it upends what we’ve come to know and expect from the internet. However, by keeping the rules simple and instead attempting to enforce the spirit behind the rules, we’re able to deal more effectively with problematic individuals and create a space in which you aren’t worried about whether you’re going to have explain to someone why you’re a human and why you shouldn’t be subject to incessant bigotry online.
The lack of clear rules just sounds ripe for power tripping.
Do note that I am NOT objecting to the need to create a bigotry-free zone. It’s important that Lemmy avoids getting infected by racism and hate, lest it end up like Voat. It’s just those bolded parts that give me bad vibes about the place.
I’m not crazy about the idea that some instances can disable downvotes.
It only affects communities on their instance.
General rule of any social media: your server, your rules.
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I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren’t/aren’t immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who’s actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.
How do you deal with r/TOTK and r/Tears_of_the_Kingdom?
Great analogy. Same with r/RingsOfPower and r/LOTR_on_Prime. One community doesn’t like the show and the other one does. You join whichever most aligns with your preference.
Maybe that’s a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub’s that the instance is aware of :)
Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology
Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO
Follow both and just post to whichever one you prefer? Eventually certain communities will tend to coalesce, but it isn’t a terrible thing if there are multiple options either.
This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.
Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers
I think there’s been talk of implementing “multireddits” so you can combine them in your own feed but who knows when it’s coming. I personally think it’s good to have the communities as segmented as possible, if one goes to shit then you can easily just stop participating there and move to others.
It’s a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don’t think democratically and rule against other people’s will deleting posts and banning everyone they don’t like.
With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)
This assumes that power doesn’t corrupt and that the big “kind” communities don’t eventually turn bad.
That’s exactly the point: if they become “bad”, we can always move to another one with the same name but on another instance
This is such a great feature and advantage.
Just to chime in, the other issue is consolidation of these communities by a small handful of people (i.e. powermods).
They’ve already started doing it here too, trying to grab all the keywords and popular communities (e.g. anime@lemmy.ml) so it’s something to keep note of moving forward too especially as certain instances start to see more growth than others.
It will sort itself out. The only difference is reddit’s search function works slightly better because it’s centralized, but I think that issue will be solved eventually
I could see a good use case for having at least a centralized, cross instance search where the instances will send up community information to the service and then the service shares it out with everyone. Rather than make a new community on my instance I could find the active community and federate it.
Then again the same thing happens on Reddit for popular topics. Like when a new game is announced there might be 5 people trying to start the subreddit for it.
Its here: https://browse.feddit.de/
How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?
I suggest creating some communities like “FindingTech”, and “FindingScience” and “FindingPets” with some similar naming convention - that covers this topic explicitly. That Finding* communities be the place people discuss the various instances and their experiences/ideals.
I could also see someone creating an entire magazine-like website that highlights new and changing communities and new owner/operators on the scene. Also present a tree of links that is organized based on reviews and allows bookmarking. Such data could be passed down to mobile clients or even some kind of webapp page of Lemmy sites.
Reddit was one big monolithic system operating under a multinational corporation jurisdiction. Small time Lemmy instances may be following conventions of a nation that end-users have never visited… it is much more of a “World Wide Web” convention, and you can see it much more in your face in how the language choice is presented to you on every posting you make.
Think about it - how long until owner/operators of Lemmy instances have to deal with DMCA takedown requests for images? Court-ordered disclosure of IP address and browser information? Who is to say that an operator won’t just put everyone’s IP Address out as public record - there are forums that operate that way. With massive websites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - a government seeking copies of deleted comments and IP Address is all behind the scenes and rarely disclosed (and even then, mostly disclosed in news reports that police got a copy of social media messages and had an account shut down after a shooting or other crime).
