Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?
If that’s the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?
Duplicate communities are good. Reddit’s biggest problem was that a group of mods would take over a topic and prevent all opinions different from their own. Here you can just jump to an alternative community.
I mostly agree, but look at the Technology community. Technology@beehaw.org, Technology@lemmy.ml, Technology@kbin.social, Technology@lemmy.world. They are all about the same thing and subscribing them all gets a lot of dupes.
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It’s not all duplicates.
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Just read all the other comments in this post asking for a technical way to merge similar communities. I’m just asking for the same thing.
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That would really depend on the community and I would argue that it is easier to take up your concerns with the admin of the instance, if a community is being mismanaged, than it would be on Reddit.
I had r/europe and r/worldnews in mind. Both communities had been hijacked by mods who turned them into echo chambers.
I’m unfamiliar with /r/Europe, but /r/worldnews did have some decent alternatives, such as /r/neutralnews. But most people seemed to flock to /r/worldnews, probably because of the name.
So lemmy having multiple communities with the same name could help with that, but there’s still the natural human tendancy to go to the more popular community. I know I prefer to go to the larger one much of the time, unless there are multiple sufficiently large options, in which case I’ll generally go with the smaller one first.
I wonder if this level of abstraction will mean a long-term sustainment of the golden days that past social platforms have had in early adopter periods. Specifically I mean platforms that predate Reddit, eg. Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, even FB in the pre-genpop days. Prior to that is before my time of early adoption (MySpace, LiveJournal, Friendster), so I have less historical context.
Admins simply need to take responsibility. If a community already exists in the Lemmyverse, I don’t allow it to be created on my instance.
That’s the thing, if instance admins do that to avoid duplicate communities, won’t that just mean that a few huge instances will be the ones with most of the popular communities, and have outsized sway/traffic costs?
Then we’re back to square one and defeat the whole purpose of distributing load across many medium instances. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
You’re not putting traffic on the server that hosts a community when you browse it from another instance. Also, I believe when you post and upload an image it’s hosted on the server you’re browsing on, not the federated one that has the community.
It gets copied to the existing community as well (and every instance it’s federated with).
So the real consideration is that large communities are heavy on storage for any instance with a user that uses it. Ideally there are lots of small communities and instances so nothing gets too much traffic.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.
I suppose the “best” way would be to distribute the big communities over different instances, like one instance gets “pics”, another gets “memes”, someone else gets “news”, etc. But of course that will never happen.
I’m taking a more free-spirited approach to my instance, communities can be formed as the users please here. The ideal would be lots of medium-sized instances each with a few large communities, but ultimately people will join where they want and we don’t have much control over it.
This is what has already happened to some extend, but communities are free to move away to another instance. Fx !Android!android@lemmy.world moved to !Android!android@lemdro.id.
You could also say that the moderators of communities that exist on multiple instances, have a certain responsibility as well, but it is tricky. Beehaw.org has many of the same communities that the rest of the Lemmyverse has, but they also defederate with the biggest instance lemmy.world.
It’s the same as the Internet. You have lots of websites that cover the same topic. The main difference is that lemmy defines a standard the different sites can follow to communicate with each other in a consistent way
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Y’all are coming here trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit.
ugh it was the worst during the mass migration. People leaving Reddit just outright being hostile at everyone - devs,mods, users, didnt matter. Just shouting at everyone demanding that it be exactly Reddit immediately.
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- just subscribe to a few of the more active communities, or
- pick and choose which flavor of community you agree with
- just like Reddit, none of the communities are exact duplicates, each has a different vibe, a different raison d’être, a different subscriber base, a different pool of commenters …
I’m pretty keen on tech so I’ve been going through the magazines on kbin, the community on Lemmy and the other random “places” to find subscriptions.
I don’t mind subscribing to multiple things so long as eventually everyone can see it and comment / engage.
Yup, I have like four subscriptions to similar communities, and I’ll probably end up removing the ones I don’t like as much. Each community has a different feel and will appeal to different people. Also, if one instance goes down, I can fall back to another.
That said, this strategy probably increases load on my instance since now I’m getting content from multiple sources instead of just one, and there’s a fair amount of duplicate content.
If you post to a community that is hosted on a different server, your post is still stored on your home server. The community server is basically just the aggregator. If the community or server goes down the posts are still hosted on their respective home servers.
So if a home server goes down will those posts disappear from the community server? And what if it goes down temporarily and not permanently, do the posts stored on the home server temporarily disappear?
I wonder how feasible it would be to set your instance up to aggregate content from duplicate communities.
We need something like “Multi-subreddits”, where you can combine communities into the same entity. Only issue is that a lot of the same posts are posted a cross all the same communities.
I’ve been thinking about this all morning and have come up with this:
When the link is the same, we can just union on the thread and sort it as any other thread.
When the link is not the same, but the content is similar, I wonder if you could run a semantic comparison (I’m only just starting to learn about this), and when the comparison scores above a certain threshold, union the threads.
Self-text posts might just make sense to leave alone.
Yeah that’ll be another problem we’ll have to figure out. Maybe if there are two meme servers, we could bridge the communities somehow so they’re just one feed for the end user.
