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Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem (popcar.bearblog.dev)

submitted 10 months ago by popcar2@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

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[-] rglullis@communick.news 20 points 10 months ago

There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?

This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.

[-] popcar2@programming.dev 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.

No, it's not always obvious which is the "main" community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.

It's not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It's social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can't feel it because it doesn't directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.

I'd also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy's github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 7 points 10 months ago

Everyone convincing each other in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner.

So when people vote according to what you prefer, it's validation of the problem. When they don't, it's "insanely toxic and dismissive". Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?

Who gives a shit about user experience anyways?

This is a type of "faster horse" case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in "centralized system" mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.

there are many communities that died due to lack of traction.

Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.

To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.

Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn't enough people interested.

What would help is that people stopped trying to find a "canonical place" to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it's been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 10 months ago

What would help is that people stopped trying to find a “canonical place” to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it’s been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.

Today I learned about this community, seems interesting