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I'm a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it's a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.

The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.

Is there something I'm missing here? Because currently I'm not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.

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[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The basic tl;dr: is that posts and comments are shared and copied between federated instances, which is why I’m signed into the reddthat.com instance, yet can see and interact with your post and comments on lemmy.world, and vice versa. Instances can defederate from other instances, stopping that share of information, which is typically done when an instance has objectionable content, is being swarmed by bot accounts that spam other instances, etc. For example many instances are defederated from the nsfw instances, so if you want that content, you have to make an account local to that instance, or on an instance that has chosen to stay federated with them.

[-] betabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't feel like that answered the op question. As an example, every general 'gaming' instance that is federated can see each other, so I subscribe to every one I can find, but then I get some posts four times in a row (or more) with varying activity. (Hence the split community point).

I wish communities could be grouped in some way.

Either they go by the wayside or take control of a topic as of now.

Also, what if I'm subscribed to the community that isn't the active one, I have to constantly find new ones to keep up instead of just my feed for that topic?

Edit: part of growing the community has to be ease of access to content, that still seems limited on lemmy, for now

[-] azdle@news.idlestate.org 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

That's a problem anywhere with user generated content & user defined communities. The usual example is that when BOTW came out there were at least half a dozen subreddits created and more than one survived, so there were two that were both really popular at the same time and that's in addition to multiple Zelda and multiple Nintendo subs that might all get the same links/posts.

[-] betabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 11 months ago

That's a fair point, but one wins out usually, where with the lemmy numbers they seem to remain split with the smaller communities.

I've been on lemmy for several months now and most communities are completely split and activity on any given 'news topic' (as an example) varies widely on 0-50+ comments for the same topic popping up on the feed from several identical communities from varying instances. (Which is why grouping might be an alternative solution)

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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
137 points (97.2% liked)

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