Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.
There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.
A cool feature would be an opt in community federation. So two aligned communities on different instances can "friend" each other and will be synonymous. If one instance disappears or one community is closed, the other will be represented as the original synced whole.
This would require content addressing to be robust. It's what bluesky's atprotocol is built around, and some are building a lemmy-like forum protocol on top of it (not ready for release yet, though).
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol
A neat part of that would be to have the ability to fork a community (if abandoned, etc) or even merge them, or even to have individual threads which are shared across multiple forums.
This is the best answer that we should strive towards. Deduplication and community combining. Deduplication is hard but a lot of other places have been attempting it for years so methods have already come a long way. Community combining could be done through partnered aggregation and tagging of communities
With Lemmy's design that would most easily be done through mirroring. One main community and the rest are replicating it.
I agree with you completely and kinda assumed this was already in place tbh.
Maybe there should be a dedicated Fediverse discussion instance, federated with everyone, as a kind of United Nations of the Fediverse?
Moderation could be tricky, but I guess a few people could give a hand.
This 100% goes against the purpose of federation. Buy one instance, own the feddiverse.
No, this would be just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, a single monolithic social media website. That one instance would have higher running costs, and also greater power and influence and would be able to shape the narrative on controversial issues.
I think Lemmy.world should not have 99.999% of communities.
We can have one fediverse community but it should not be on Lemmy.world. It's already extreamly centralized with almost all users. It should have all communities as well?
I feel the same about every other duplicate community. Because i actually care about having a decentralized fediverse.
.ml also has a lot of active communities though. While I agree .ml is better than .world, feeding any one of these won't be good for decentralization anyway.
Completely agree.
Pushing for https://lemmy.film/, literature.cafe/, https://mander.xyz/ etc. as much as I can, but the established communities usually have the natural inertia working for them.
Lemmy neads a feature where people can "merge" communities from different instances so it appears like a single one.
How will they merge moderation then? Every instance has their own set of rules. If it's done automatically, it will cause a lot of trouble in a long run.
Doesn't have to, it would just be on the user end.
Like on reddit you could do multi-reddits, for example I could type in r/anime_titties+worldnews+news and I would get posts from all 3 communities in a single feed.
Oh, got ya! That's a neat feature, for sure. But it doesn't fix this concern:
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.
Deciding on a single community to rule them all is a bit hard because of defederation - shall we choose .world and we basically remove beehaw users from discussion, and .ml also has their defederation list. Communities like c/fediverse and c/lemmy must be available to everyone IMO.
I think this is just another variant of FOMO. You don't need to and will never be able to read every fediverse discussion taking place on Lemmy. So just relax, subscribe to what ever community feels more home to you personally and that's it 🤷♂️
Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.
I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
I'm subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it's a bit annoying. But it's also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don't, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
This seems to be an issue we should probably discuss, as it may prevent growth of the platform if most of the new joiners face it.
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I find this to be more positive than negative. The tone of the entire comment section tends to be set by the first few comments meaning every post has a high risk of becoming it's own tiny echo chamber. Spreading comments across multiple communities makes it more likely that the discussion will explore different aspects of the topic and that different opinions on the topic will be explored.
Also discussions on different instances may have different flavors: e.g., many .world users prefer to participate in local communities, while .ml is federated with beehaw and hexbear, so it's kinda have a wider reach within threadiverse. Communities on smaller instances may be predominately populated by users of said instance.
The way i handle this is to sub to the biggest community on a given topic i can find. The exception to this is if i find a smaller community that is more active.
I just sub to them all, there's no limit like on reddit.
The dups annoy me, otherwise i would.
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.
Why do you think you need to post twice? This is what happens.
Because Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml have their own defederation lists, meaning that to reach everyone, you need to post twice.
That's actually part of the issue I was detailing in my post.
I don't think this matters. If they are defederated from an instance you post in, then they determined that they don't want to see what gets posted there. Why is it so important to reach everyone?
(To be fair, I think you should be able to post the same thing 10 times if you really want to, I just wish the site I use had a feature that would just automatically pool all posts with identical headings or links into a single post, then treat it like a mini community/magazine.)
I think the issue I have is that I feel that in the last few days, the content seems more stale.
That’s why I had a look at active users and noted that we were fewer.
One potential way to address this would be to have one community to be the announcement one to the rest of the Fediverse.
Today, it feels like getting information to people is a hassle. They arrive on the platform, they subscribe to the top communities, and then what? How are they supposed to learn about LASIM, that if they move to a smaller instance for better performance they might have to ask their admin to run LCS to get a populated All feed, that they can have a look at !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl for rising communities?
We probably lack a reference website to answer all of these questions. But even then, due to how fast the platform evolves, we would still need a way to communicate new tools or features to most of the users.
as lemmy grows and or stabilises some communities will get bigger and more mainstream
Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
It seems almost all commenters here are agreeing with the premise that ‘posters [have] to crosspost to both’.
I don’t think this is true. It leads to people subscribed to both having two identical posts with different responses in their feed, which is annoying. Just post to the one that you’re ‘closest’ to, or pick one at random.
Part of beauty of federation is that you can see all the content from multiple places. Cross-posting is not required!
With all the defederation going on nowadays I'm happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn't participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;