this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on [email protected].

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities ([email protected] and [email protected] ) is that is leads to

  • people having to subscribe to both to see the content
  • posters having to crosspost to both
  • comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think the mods of the duplicate communities should join forces, agree on uniting the communities and close all but one (the other pointing to the united one).

I don't think there's really a good reason to keep communities split. (there are of course contingencies where it makes sense, like rogue mods etc.)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t think there’s really a good reason to keep communities split.

The federated nature of the fediverse with all it's implications.

An instance hosting a community might

  • become unstable
  • disappear forever
  • defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
  • same for the instances of other users of that community

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in

  • moderation style
  • policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

I think it's good to have some redundancy both as a backup and to have some choice. As with all things fediverse, we don't need to find a consensus. Those who like to have one big instance or community can join the biggest. Those who prefer some diversity can spread out and create duplicates. Reality will most likely always be something in between.

Another approach could be to ask: Why are communities split? If you're right and there's really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often? Maybe the prevalence of the phenomenon hints at reasons which exist, but are not well understood.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in

Communities can also look like they have the same topic on the surface level, but be completely different when in the context of their own instances. The obvious example is "news" or "politics" or other "real world things" communities on separate country-focused instances, but also "news" on an art instance could be dedicated to "art news" or "writing news" in a writing specific instance.

Or the distinction could be more subtle, like a tech community on slrpnk could focus towards more eco-friendly viewpoints to news about tech compared to a general purpose instance's tech community. Or Beehaw, for example, seems to lean on more "serious" talk and discussion (or I imagine it would given it's history, I avoid visiting too news-heavy communities due to vaguely gestures at everything) compared to, say, .world which really seems to embody Reddit's free-for-all vibe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Good point, thanks for spelling it out. I was only vaguely aware of what you just described.

That seems to be something unique, tied to the federated structure. Could be confusing for people coming from monolithic platforms. They may not realize what they are seeing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

An instance hosting a community might

become unstable
disappear forever
defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
same for the instances of other users of that community

I kind of get this, but:

  • it seems premature to split the community "just in case"
  • this is largely a technical problem. IMHO communities should be federated in the sense that losing the instance shouldn't automatically mean the community is lost.

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in moderation style policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

Also possible, but in most cases a large majority of community members can certainly agree on some compromise.

Why are communities split? If you’re right and there’s really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often?

  • the lack of community federation
  • "my instance is better than yours" - which IMHO originates again from the lack of community federation
  • some mods just like the unrestricted power over their fiefdom
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Didn't .world admins force-reopen the Android communtity here after they decided to merge with the community on lemdro.id? I'm not sure how well that's gonna go with this community considering at least 2 mods here seem to be admins of .world, unless the community on .ml comes to here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, what was the reasoning for the force reopening?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People seeing the lock of the .world community as a power trip from the lemdro.id mods (which were coming from Reddit)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Although it's worth clarifying the [email protected] mods did not have any power in that decision. The original mods of the LW android community made that choice independently

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Indeed! Sorry, it's been a while and with everything that's happening lately it's hard to keep track of all details!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This did indeed happen. The mods of the LW Android community decided to migrate and merge with the [email protected] community. Most people were fine with it, but several very vocal people were not. There was much vitriol. In the end, the admins re-opened the original LW android community with new mods.

I'm not really sure this is such a bad thing. The two can co-exist. I think most of the anger of the few vocal people came from disliking the Reddit r/Android mods. It does frustratingly split some participation though.

Disclaimer: I am the founding admin of lemdro.id, however I do not mod the android community on it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yep. Make it so the mods choose to "federate" with the other communities. Otherwise you might have something like [email protected] and [email protected] which would merge despite having two different purposes.