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Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem (popcar.bearblog.dev)
submitted 2 years ago by 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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[–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

federation isn’t perfect

Again: so what? It's reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.

You can’t guarantee that.

You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn't bother me, and I truly don't understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.

Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn’t decentralized.

Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls "Thinking in Words". If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it's easy to coordinate a move away.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's a huge problem with the platform which you choose to ignore by saying "so what". It's impossible to refute someone who digs in their heels and says "so what" to everything and not seeing the problem.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There is a difference between "not seeing the problem" and "asking yourself what are the implications of it". I'm running 15+ instances and I'm running a website that is devoted to help people find the "canonical" community in the fediverse. I can point to dozens of other issues that are a lot more "painful" to me as an user and an instance admin, none of them are related with the "pain of having to choose which community to join or focus".

    I'm again going to ask: is there any actual, practical example of this being such a "huge issue"?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And yet people want a better solution and are asking for it. And the only response you, an owned of 15+ instances, and an admin of a website that helps people find instances, can make is "deal with it it's meant to be hard". It's a huge usability problem, it's funny that you don't see it. Consider this my last reply to you.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    You repeated the accusation of "not seeing it", misinterpreted what I am saying as "deal with it, it's meant to be hard" when I am actually saying the exact opposite (It does not require a lot of work to figure out "organically" and it is not hard to workaround the issue) and when asked repeatedly for actual instances of this being "a huge usability issue", you run away with some pretentious posturing. That's just lame.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's the Linux mindset, the pain is the point.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Bruh we just don't do the addiction painkillers of corporate. Doesn't mean at all that the pain is the point.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago

    The pain is the point. The fediverse expects you to know the right answer, and go through the pain of figuring it out. It could make changes to make finding the answer easier, but new usersare expected to suffer just like existing ones have.

    It's the same with Linux, you have to know a handful of quirks that could be eliminated, but doing so provides 0 benefits to existing users. No one cares about letting new users have an easier time than they did.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    Yeah I have seen this plenty in open source. It's like people don't want other people to use their software, or they forget a regular user isn't tech savy and they just want to talk about their hobby, not look around in 50 places seeing where to post.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If the system does not depend on a central authority

    In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.

    it’s easy to coordinate a move away.

    It's not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven't seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.

    That doesn’t bother me, and I truly don’t understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.

    Cool. It doesn't bother you. Then just keep doing what you're doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won't care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don't care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?

    This isn't about maximizing reach of our posts. It's about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase

    Great, so let's talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

    There is no point

    Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities.

    Why? That's a pretty big assumption to think a significant share of people will default to create a new community, when the most likely scenario is that they will browse around their own instance to find out what is already here.

    Even in the most extreme cases, we have 4-5 "repeated" communities and they all eventually consolidated into one.

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