What hurts Lemmy more are the communities that are repost bot communities.
I get the need for the repost bots during the starts of the migration of Reddit users to Lemmy, but these days they just make it hard to be seen in some communities, they prevent new original content to develop in those communities as no one will want to post just to have their post drowned out by content that doesn't even come from this place.
I block every community that is just reddit reposts and somehow I still block about 4 or 5 a day
Kbin / Mbin actually fixed this by allowing if a Community isn't managed for 3 months by mods then it will be available for people to claim to admin. This allows people to keep the Community going and hopefully blow some life into it.
I seem to recall on reddit there were a lot of subs that somehow had mods who modded hundreds of subs, and didn't participate and weren't a part of the actual communities. It seemed these people just liked collecting subs. I'd worry that with an automated system people like this (or even bots) will show up, and just start squatting (so to speak) on the mod rights to communities. Time will tell, I guess, with growth.
@ragica it's worked the opposite way so far.
People who made a bunch of communities and then didn't participate are the ones who were displaced after the update by active mods. I help out at a couple like that myself.
The system can always be tweaked if it doesn't scale right, but for now it's been quite revitalizing.
This, plus people can claim it and delete it if that makes more sense.
Yeah it's one of the many reasons I use Kbin / Mbin over Lemmy. Really hope features like that come to Lemmy in the future.
We already have such a feature tho. Two of the communities I mod were "adopted" because the original creators abandoned them.
Does it do it automatically or do you have to request from the admins of the instance?
You have to request them on !support@lemmy.world ... and sadly it is not yet well-known. Automating the procedure (like making a community freely availiable after 6 months or so) would make adopting them a whole lot easier, but the additional hurdle of having to ask a supporter first means that they can decide on a case-by-case basis which lowers the risk of trolls taking over communities just to mess with them.
Both have their pro's and con's.
On Kbin it's automated, but so far if a community is active they're the ones who're likely to request to own it, and if a troll took it the others could bring it up with Ernest at that point.
Me too. I get the impression we might have better discoverability in terms of being able to see what's active, and who is doing what where, as well.
Anxiety about the existence of inactive or small communities seems to be more of a Lemmy thing.
Not any more than reddit is hurt by dead subreddits. I don't see it as a big problem. But I think discovery is a bigger issue - finding new communities.
Yeah I'm pretty tired of manually blocking all the fucking furry porn
This now the third time I'm seeing someone complain about furry porn on Lemmy and I'm just wondering..... Where!?
All I ever see is politics politics politics politics tech billionaire farted politics politics politics Elon Musk politics politics.
i love it tho 😩 the new generation of linux users is sooooooo suk
I think being able to start your own community so easily is a great feature of Lemmy, and I also think that abandoned communities regardless of when they were started up should be culled or mothballed after a certain duration of inactivity.
But I thought I read a post where this was actually happening anyway, I think it's down to the instance's moderation how strictly policed communities are
My problem is the same community on different instances. I block it once place but it pops up again on my feed in another instance.
Yeah I find it sometimes helpful that multiple people can run communities in different instances but ATM it would be good if a few people created alternatives to set reddit like communities and we all go from there. Maybe it's a project someone could work on.
The main issue is that different people prefer different approaches based on instances
All of them are valid, but those different views prevent merging the communities
That's fair enough, I know that I want to see smaller communities to grow such as ones for certain games and creators. Making it into a place not only for Techy people is what the Fediverse needs to grow to wider audiences.
Yes, I think so but only indirectly. Distinguishing between the "same" community on different instances or rather identifying the more active one is already pretty hard, the only thing one can really go by is the number of users who have joined. The large number of abandoned copycat communities on 3+ servers doesn't make this easier since a lot of these have a bunch of users but are dead.
A technical solution could be some kind of "hotness" score for instances to identify the interesting/active ones.
Kind of. The squatters with no activity in the communities are annoying. The small niche ones that are just slow seem normal, not everything needs to be popular and busy.
One can request abandoned communities at !support@lemmy.world. The mods can either transfer ownership to someone else directly (which keeps all the content intact) or nuke the community so the interested user can start from scratch.
Not many people seem to be aware about this tho, or maybe don't want to ask openly, or feel bad taking over what someone else had started.
So, as for your actual question, I think culling completely inactive, empty communities after a while would be the best option, so the names are freed up again for people who are actually interested in moderating. If the community already has content but no (active) mods, then "adopting" it is the better option, but there should be an additional way to communicate all of that clearer to the userbase. Maybe something like the current "community spotlight" but advertising abandoned communities that are up for adoption ...?
I wasn't aware, thanks!
Userbase is sufficient for generic topics, not specific ones (there are exceptions)
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee is quite active, !dundermifflin@lemmy.ml not so much
But people insist on creating incredibly specific niche communities, I'm certain because they want to establish their own fiefdoms when this "blows up".
I think there’s a problem it introduces for users, particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
The first problem is discovery. Discovery isn’t something that can be solved server side afaik without adding a unifying layer to act as an indexer, which is kind of feasible but not really in the federated spirit and would need client integration in any case. Discovery could be made better on the client side, but every client I’ve tried so far has no idea how to do results ranking. I’ll search for “politics” and the top result will be from a topic on an instance with zero posts and two subscribers. Some allow users to specify a sort order but miss results present on other clients, and the sort orders are pretty primitive and only allow you to choose one. I’m also honestly unsure how mainstream search engine indexing is supposed to work (eg “Toyota repair reddit”).
The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances. This problem is exacerbated by the lower content rate, which leaves people browsing /all in case someone posted something interesting somewhere. Again, maybe this is something you could do client side with some off the shelf recommendation engine, and I think a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed, and even posts (on identical articles, for example) into a single displayed post, such that the conversation could cross multiple instances transparently.
The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances
Kbin shows where links have been posted on other federated servers. It's 10/10 for finding what community is actively discussing a post. I even found a few new subs I gave up on being active here.
@Sabata11792 it's great, we can see at a glance exactly where the active discussions are, when the crossposts are etc.
That update seriously reinvigorated my enthusiasm for KBin as a platform. It's really nice to see a story I find interesting, regardless of magazine/community, then see where folks are actually discussing it.
@wjrii me too - and if there's more than one discussion, sometimes they have gone in different directions.
I also like the way it gives me a chance to upvote the original poster, and see communities I didn't know were out there.
And, it helps avoid reposts within the same community, not to mention the phenomenon I saw recently where a post got posted in community A, cross-posted in community B, and then reposted as a cross-post from community B into community A again. :D
particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
I feel like this isn’t discussed in enough of these meta discussions.
I want, for instance, for a video game discussion to have some input from the dude who has just buys Madden and Call of Duty every year.
Absolutely. I think the entire community benefits when we have 60 year old ladies with gardening tips, foodies discussing fine dining and recipes, pet owners with advice driven by twenty years of owning chihuahuas, and sports people talking about sports (okay, that one’s not so much in my ballpark, as it were, but it’s all part of having communities).
If it’s a community for Linux users, or ML folks (machine learning, not politics), or the otherwise terminally online and tech obsessed, I’m fine with the bar for participation being high. At that point we have a filter rather than a net. But if we want to displace (or at least be a serious alternative) to services like Reddit, we need to make the on-ramp and UX easy for people whose interests are interesting but don’t necessarily include technology beyond knowing how to click on the blue words. If someone can tell me that putting an aspirin in my rhododendron will make it spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus, I don’t care if they know the fediverse from a hole in the ground.
Also, I made that tip up. Don’t do it, or if you do let me know if it actually works.
a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed
We have this at Kbin - collections (like multireddits, but shareable/followable as well); they really help with discovery.
It's a great feature, I hope you get something like it for Lemmy.
I think if we could get something like this and build an Apollo type UI around it, we’d accelerate adoption and some app builder would make a fair chunk of money. I’m not allowed to build apps, but I do hope someone takes this up.
Thank you for this. I know these kinds of resources exist, and I even occasionally remember to make use of them :)
What I’m suggesting is that lemmy (and the community as a whole) would benefit from baking this functionality into the clients (including the web front ends if that’s a big chunk of the user base).
Discoverability is always a problem. Even centralized services such as Reddit have issues - I was still discovering new communities pretty much until the day I left after being on there since Alien Blue came out. It’s worse in decentralized communities because of the nature of the beast. Back in the Usenet days, it was considered a point of pride to know enough to find niche newsgroups, and even ones like alt.hack felt exclusive. Most of it passed around by word of mouth.
Even though the Usenet-like aspects of lemmy give it advantages over centralized sites like Reddit, I think we’ve learned enough over the last 30 years or so that we know user experience is absolutely critical if you want a popular service. I’m going to hazard a guess that when the big, well funded apps start to federate, they’re going to have those kinds of features built in. I’d rather see some of the smaller developers roll out features like that first, so that they can continue to be competitive (as AB and later on Apollo were for Reddit).
We could use some consolidation - if anything, it’s not general enough in some areas, and others are so tightly defined it’s a circle-jerk.
Edit: had a rethink - I mean it’s all very flat. I wouldn’t mind a small hierarchy to find the topic, and more granularity in subgroups.
Pretty much all the copycat communities suck ass. They don't have any of the charm of the originals and are all just poorly-moderated, homogenous crap
I don't think it matters. Communities can specialize in whatever they like and as long as they belong to a large enough instance they should get some level of traction.
There are numerous reasons people might want to split off. For example if an anime community is being dominated by news and release dates maybe fans of a specific show want to go somewhere they can talk in detail and they can find slightly older (ex. 2 months) posts to engage with.
People who want to seek out a specific community can.
Doom scrolling on lemmy is better than reddit
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