How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by mtcerio@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:

If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?

I was subscribed to android@lemmy.world, and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.

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[-] BURN@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

They haven’t. I’ve given up on finding new communities at this point since it’s a ton of work to figure out which ones are active and which ones are worth subscribing to.

It’s one of the biggest problems with the platform, despite it also being one of the biggest selling points.

[-] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I disagree, I haven't found it much of an issue. I do two things:

Every once in a while I use Lemmy Explorer to look at what's available and how active.
Sort by "All" and one of the short "Tops" or, more often, "New" to see where things I'm interested in are being posted, then subscribed to those.

I'm not sure why the duplicates are a big deal. What problems do they cause?

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Confusion and activity.

If there’s 4 different communities for my already niche community, none of the 4 are going to have decent levels of participation.

I don’t like being subscribed to a large number of communities. It gets hard to sort and read. I prefer to have my subscribed list being small and focused and then just searching for anything else, which doesn’t really work.

I hated having to discover subreddits too, so it’s nothing new for me

[-] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

With Reddit, sorting by new was insane - so many submittals every minute that it was a useless approach for finding subs. But Lemmy is orders of magnitude smaller - you can do all/new and get a pretty good feel for content in a dozen pages. Can do the same with top day.

Long term, I think the competing communities could be an issue, but I doubt many duplicate sets will stay long term - people will migrate to the most active.

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Sounds like you might find this useful https://lemmyverse.net/communities

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

While that’s useful, I’m not a fan of needing to subscribe to individual communities. I like keeping my subscribed feed to a few subs that I interact with regularly. I’m an outlier of a use case for sure, but it was the same on Reddit. Only ever subscribed to 8-10 communities, the rest were from the front pages.

[-] kobra@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s a feature not a bug. Your frustration is with the fediverse and decentralization itself.

Up to you to decide if this is more or less frustrating than a CEO like spez 🤷‍♂️

[-] hamsteronvase@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

False choice fallacy. Those are not the only two choices. We can look for ways for lemmy itself to help resolve the issue.

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I know it is, and it’s why I’m still not sure I’m going to stick around. I don’t like federation. It’s confusing and is going to be what keeps this platform from any kind of mainstream adoption.

I personally don’t see the point if it doesn’t grow a whole lot more. Most of the communities I enjoyed on Reddit don’t exist here and probably never will, because they were already niche communities on Reddit.

[-] mtcerio@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, yes, I agree

this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023

59 points (91.5% liked)

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