Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
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 (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) 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.
I feel like it's more of a client issue than a Lemmy issue. We could imagine having clients that correctly support crossposting by having tabs for each comment section.
Or alternatively, all the comments across them should be visible in-line in all communities.
Either of these approaches gives the agency to users to only reply to one of the cross post and read all the opinions/thoughts on that post. At the same time, it maintains the federation philosophy by not taking a community about a topic down, if the instance fails.
It would be very beneficial to have clients that support aggregating equivalent communities from multiple instances. When viewing a post from the aggregated community there could be a section at the top saying "Viewing comments from:" and then a dropdown to choose between "all instances", "lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml", etc. When viewing all comments, they would be in one combined feed, without the user needing to care about which underlying post holds the specific thread they're looking at.
Similarly, when users post something to an aggregate community, they could select whether it's posted to all the included communities, only one, or some specific subset.