Honest thoughts: I think fractured communities are what’s causing the issue.
You end up with the same post on 5 different instances, each with a fraction of the engagement it would get in one place.
I wonder if some way of federating communities might be a better way, eg, c/photograohy could exist on both lemmy.world and lemm.ee, have submissions and comments from both.
If one of them is down we see half the posts but they should be together and one. Hopefully the mods won’t get a power trip and try to make separate
Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.
I dislike that idea. It brings a lot of messyness if the only mod on one server is asleep, etc.
Im not sure if one god owner of a “federated community” is the right answer. But i do think nods across multiple servers is the right answer? Perhaps giving all individual server community owners equal powers is a good choice?
Edit: Maybe it’s something server admins could do? “Hey, c/photography, is now an alias for photography@lemm.ee”. Maybe if they decide to unalias it, the local photography becomes a mirror of the remote instance. Then local users could interact as normal, and the remote instance would see incoming users acting as normal remote users?
I think the balance between “sovereign communities”, benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.
Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):
- What I described before as “federated collectives”. New communities can join a collective by asking the others. Maybe there will be a user-weighted vote on this or some other governance mechanism, or maybe it will be consensus-based. Communities can be kicked out of collectives by the same mechanisms or leave on their own. The collective can decide whether mutual mod actions are allowed or not.
- “Colonial-style” relationships. One “empire” community has powers over other “colony” communities. The empire’s mods can (maybe) perform mod actions on colony communities but not vice versa. Colonies can declare independence or the empire can kick them out. Colonies can join only by asking the empire to accept them.
- “Roman Republic collectives”: Mods (or active users?) of communities elect a board of prefects for the collective. Prefects (maybe) get mod powers on all communities. The prefects can vote to accept new communities or kick others out. Maybe they can get other management powers too. The “benevolent dictatorship” case is just a special case of Roman Republic where the number of prefects is 1
Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.
Ya’ll are basically talking about how Lemmy works already. You have c/photography on Lemmy.ml. And while you’re logged into Lemmy.world, it’s c/photography@lemmy.ml.
You subscribe on Lemmy.world and comment on Lemmy.world and everything is synced. If Lemmy.ml is down, you can still see everything and comment from Lemmy.world and itll sync once Lemmy.ml is back online.
I mean, yea that makes sense but I see a ton of dup communities that don’t seem even remotely synced up…I could be wrong but yea 🤔
If you’re talking about communities existing on each instance, ie lemmy.world/c/photography and lemmy.ml/c/photography then yeah, those won’t sync. But the users need to coalesce around once of those, say the lemmy.ml one, then when you go to lemmy.world/c/photography@lemmy.ml. The duplicate communities is no different than Reddit having 2 similar subreddits.
That’s not what they’re talking about, though. What they’re wanting is something that would, for example, combine the feeds for c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world into one collective c/photography.
That’s just unnecessary, though. The only effect of this is to have numerous separately moderated communities, which sounds like a nightmare to me.
The only effect of this is to have numerous separately moderated communities
That’s… already the case? c/photography@lemmy.ml and c/photography@lemmy.world, again for example, are already separately moderated communities. The only thing this would change is that instead of subscribing to both individually and seeing their content separately, you could subscribe to a collective c/photography that would show you content from both communities.
I guess what you’re looking for is the equivalent of a multireddit.
That’s why i changed my wording part way through to “Alias.” Allowing someone to say, “this name actually refers to an offer server name.”
This means that the shitty UX of searching for cool communities is marginally better.
I think the user’s just need to coalesce around a single instance’s community and let the other ones go away. Don’t treat each instance’s version of a community the same. Subscribe to the one that has the most users (or best mods) and let the other ones die.
It’s no different than reddit having multiple subreddits with similar themes. r/xbox vs r/xboxone for instance. If I’m looking to subscribe to one, I will look at the subreddit with the most users and ignore the other one.
This is what I do too, but doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose of the fediverse? Naturally the communities on the largest instances will have the most users. I realize this shouldn’t need to be the case but after several months using lemmy it clearly is the case.
If everything settles down onto 2-3 monolithic instances, aren’t we just back to a slightly worse reddit?
2-3 monolithic instances is probably inevitable for general usage. And also, this is 100% better than a single privately controlled corporation.
There are also niche instances where specific communities may fit better on than the general instances.
And also, if the 2-3 monolithic instances start fucking around, there are plenty of alternate instances we can migrate to.
How long do I wait?
Well, as a Lemmy pioneer, you are a part of the user’s that decides which instance’s community wins. Quit supporting all instance’s versions of the same community. Choose one, and if a different one wins out, switch.
So, as a new user to Lemmy: i have to go and hunt down all the cool communities, not just within my own instance (akin to reddit) but across the fediverse?
That’s some shitty UX. We can do better.
It’s not really all that different.
Please, propose an aternative.
The only annoying part about it (and believe me, it is certainly annoying) is trying to subscribe to a community that no one on your home instance has subscribed to yet. I don’t think I ever got it to work. The UX of that needs to be improved, definitely. But once your instance has at least one person subscribed to a community your instance “knows” about it and it shows up in the search (and “r/all”, not sure what to call it on Lemmy) just like everything else on your instance.
So no, it’s really not all that different except for brand new communities no one on your instance has subscribed to yet.
I think since you are the one who finds it to be shitty UX perhaps you could propose something. And since lemmy is opensource, you can have a look at where the hooks are needed to enable the proposed solution.
That’s no different than Reddit. You want to follow a hobby on Reddit, you need to find the specific community that is most popular even though there could be thousands.
Tradeoffs.
If we want the flexibility of not being beholden to a monolith of mods like reddit, then we have to accept the consequence that anyone can create a community anywhere.
It’s not hard to search the fediverse, just takes effort to filter. In fact, the great overwhelming volume we get from it is testament to how much better this is than reddit.
Seems to me you’re tilting at windmills.
At what point would that trade of be not worth it?
Right now in my head, it seems that too many communities are being started, and for most interests there is no clear “winning” community.
Huh?
You’re here aren’t you? I think that says you consider the tradeoffs worth it.
I think the better solution would be something like collections that dedup or crosspost them - both pics on lemmy.world and lemm.ee could exist in a collection. For that matter, it would solve the fractured communities as well as the “far too niche communities for such a small userbase” issue. Pics collection could include pics, photography, black&whitepics, etc.
(I have no idea technically how this would work or even if it could)
Who would set up, maintain, and police these collections?
Would the end goal be a collection of every c/photography community across the fediverse in one collection? How would you prevent someone from blogspaming their links to every individual community?
As with any technical implementation: The tech side is almost always far easier than trying to come up with a “good” or “right” solution.
I have no idea, i imagine it would be like a multireddit. The initial creator curates it, but the mods of the communities admin. Copies can be made if you don’t like the original collection, or its been abandoned?
I would hope a collection would have a bit more deduping/crossposted logic?
But i could see even having it so you can post to a collection- but before posting, it asks you which community fits best (ranks similar names by subscribers) this way you post to the most popular one. This should naturally make the user base gravitate to one or another.
Deduping the same post or link is easy. The same image… there are ways. Images modified to look different, that’s where the trouble would start.
Couldn’t we do collections within an app on a per-user basis?
Like I could create a collection of different communities that I see as having some commonality, then it’s only a view for me.
But I’m no dev, so take that into consideration.
I might be a dev, but I’m dev enough to understand it’s actually about communication and understanding the problem and not writing code. Writing code is pretty easy by comparison.
I think collections are a good and useful feature on their own merit, I’m not sure if they’ll solve the fragmented communities issue.
If my problem is that a single article is being posted to 5 different photography community, and each with 2 comments, well, now I can see them together, but people are still not talking to each other. Social media platforms live and die by users talking to each other IMO.
Good points/explanation about the fragmentation breaking the communication.
Hmm, not sure if we can take any active position toward “fixing”, since it’s really hard to predict the outcome of our actions. Perhaps this is something that will continue to mature as communities coalesce.
I think I’d still like the ability to build my own in-app filters that aggregate communities. Like you’d do with a podcast app. Then at least (for an individual) you’d see all the posts that you consider related in a single feed/folder/view.
It’s definitely not a simple problem.
I 100% agree with this!
I don’t think this is unpopular. Well, at least I hope it is not. Those bots are horrendous.
Have you tried blocking them?
What seems to be popular is the inability of people to use basic Lemmy functions… not sure if because of UI discoverability, or because they really want some algorithm to feed them clickbait mush.
I have. I actually defederated my instance from lemmit. But many users do not have that option, and user blocking can be tedious if the offending bots are many.
So you could say I am quite aware of Lemmy’s basic functions, yes.
If I’m not mistaken, lemmit has a single bot account, easy for anyone to block… and I haven’t seen anyone else running similar bots.
So what is all this even about?
On Lemmy World we banned a lot of those bots since they are spammy and often post in communities where they are the only user so there is no moderation. So that’s most likely the reason why it’s not an issue for you.
Oh… that makes sense.
I keep a lemmy.ee account just to subscribe to bot populated communities. I also don’t get “spammed”, since I only check the Subscribed feed on there, but All looks like a mess.
One of the n-th things I miss on Lemmy, is creating custom feeds without having to jump instances. And for admins to be able to decide what goes into their All.
When I block a bot it crashes the app.
Which app? Seems to work fine for me in Jerboa, Liftoff and Sync. Blocking all bots in Lemmy’s account settings seems to work too.
Memmy for Lemmy iOs at the time. Trying out Avelon now. Still figuring my tweaks.
Fragmented communities are.
My front page has the same thing 10-15 times because they were cross posted to so many different instances.
I’ve reduced my Lemmy usage by probably 95% because of it. I scroll so much but get nowhere.
No matter what my sort options are.
Edit: which aren’t always bots, unfortunately. A ton of people see them from other communities and will post the same thing to theirs. Blocking bots does not help.
Have you considered unsubscribing from the fragments? Dramatically reduce your subs and you’ll have a much better time.
It’s all over my front page. Even the few that I am subscribed to, I kinda need to be because of the fragmentation. There are 3 main Android communities. If I only pick one, I miss news, but if I pick all 3, I get a ton of duplicate news.
Lemmy is flawed. They need to publish an update where Lemmy condenses these posts into one post with a drop down where you can open and choose which instance you want to view it from. Shouldn’t be hard, and to prevent any issues, allow the user to condense a certain time period. For example, allow me to condense all posts that are the same URL that were posted in the past 6 or 24 hours. Make the most popular post the “main” one, and have a drop down to view the other ones.
I know it’s possible because I used to have an extension to check if any URL I was currently on was posted to Reddit, and if it was, show me every single instance of it. It was useful to see exactly where the news article I was viewing was posted on, or the YouTube video, etc.
I had very high hopes for Lemmy, but the fact I’ve been here for a month before the Reddit API changes, I have seen the clusterfuck that Lemmy has become. There’s no way new users are going to even sign up when the front page is repost city.
The way i see it is that it is okay to miss some things. I only sub to one android community (lemdroid), one tech community (lemmy world), one privacy community, etc. I am okay with possibly missing the first post about a thing because of this. It helps a lot. Another thing i do is use thunder to sort by “top today” once a day on the all feed to see what everyone thinks is important.
Unrelated, but I don’t sub to lemdroid because it’s run by the same toxic moderators of the subreddit.
Just thought that might be useful info for anyone who didn’t know.
This works for the individual (as long as they concede to knowing missing content). But if everyone does this it kinda destroys lemmy because you never get the critical mass of users in any one community to have meaningful discussion.
Which highlights the issue of your proposal for me, that I’m not concerned about missing “content” in the form of links. I don’t like missing out on conversations. But when they are fragmented as they are now with so few people in each, discussion ends up quite limited as well. If people just silence one or more “duplicate” communities to reduce the issue of repeat content then it ensures discussions remain fragmented as well.
I think one community becomes the dominate like on reddit and others offshoot due to mod differences, community rules, etc. As an example, i am not sure if anxdroid lemdroid is the largest community, but it is run by the r/android mods and i see no issue with how its run so that is the one i sub to. If i ever began to dislike it i might move to android lemmy ml or something.
Hopefully we see it mature this way, and eventually we some primary communities (per subject), with some smaller communities, and the tiny ones just being subsumed by the others.
As the top mod of one of these Android communities, our comm on LW usually isn’t super heavy on the news front and I feel our content is generally pretty different than the others, and duplicate news posts happens pretty rarely.
Nailed it.
That and this place being crazy crazy overwhelmingly progressive (not shade) is going to push people away. Seeing 4 or 5 of the same tankie posts in a row with little other content but politics is going to ensure nobody is able to find more sharable content.
Communists and socialists are not progressive. Progressivism is a liberal ideology.
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.World
And yes, I know you can switch. Nobody outside of the most hardcore are going to deal with multiple instances, moving identity, etc.
If the situation doesn’t get better regarding how that works, either through community or tech, I’ll move back to Reddit eventually as will most of the folks who jumped on after the failed protest.
this place being crazy crazy overwhelmingly progressive (not shade) is going to push people away.
This is a serious concern. As a moderate, I usually get fed-up with how lop-sided it is here pretty quickly.
When I first joined Lemmy, I was optimistic that there would be a good exchange of ideas and open discussions from differing viewpoints. Unfortunately, that only lasted until I found the Agora. At which point I realized I had just joined Survivor Lemmy, and was always wondering which instance was going to get voted off the island this week. I pretty much dropped my sh.itjust.works account after that.
It is amazing how toxic the environment can be towards people with differing political views. I can’t remember the last time I was here and didn’t see someone calling conservatives fascists or saying they should die. Also, it is pretty rare day when I see someone use the word communist here instead of the pejorative “tankie”. Definitely not the kind of environment to foster inclusion.
If there wasn’t such an emphasis on civility, anti-racism, anti-bigotry, and non-toxicity here then I wouldn’t expect anything and probably wouldn’t even notice, but with that emphasis it seems to stand out even more.
To be honest I’ve been a little confused on the various posts just being links back to Reddit. Not sure what the benefit is for the poster?
I think the idea was to get some data into lemmy, to seed it from reddit. Seems to have run its course.
Whenever I see the same person reposting like that, I downvote all but whatever seems the highest voted or post in the most specific community. Reducing such spam is one of the values of the downvote IMO. Though unfortunately depending on where the community is hosted, the downvoting may or may not actually work.
I see it as little different from downvoting someone posting the same comment in a thread. They’re simply not contributing to making the site better and in fact are actively making it worse. I don’t mind a single cross post so that they can use both a smaller community and a bigger, more general one, but take issue when they’re posting to a dozen big communities (especially ones that most people are likely subscribed to anyway). To anyone who does this, I wag my finger at you.
As I understand it, seeing the same post multiple times when it is cross-posted is an app issue. The default desktop UI combines them all into one post with links near the top showing the other communities it was cross-posted to.
I never see the multiple post thing you are talking about.
Yeah. We need conversations here. We need to generate our own content. Sometimes the reposting bots give us something to talk about, but I think 90% of them don’t get any conversation going.
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Not just Reddit bots… “There is a discussion on [Reddit, Hacker News, etc…] but feel free to comment here as well.” (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Hacker news gets me a lot
Easily the most annoying Lemmy bot at the moment.
Your opinion is not unpopular, everyone wants these dumb repost/article bots that post the same link in 15 communities gone.
Yeah, initially I thought it would be a good idea to kick-start discussion for certain communities, but in practice nobody comments on those posts.
I ended up blocking the bots too.
The reason I personally don’t comment on those bot posts is because there’s no real OP that might be interested in my answer/opinion so I think “Why even bother?”.
Pretty much.
Why do I want to read a bot of AITA on a different site? That really makes no sense to me.
Yeah, you can always block them
Blocking works really well cause there’s so few of them. I’ve only blocked a single one (months ago) and haven’t had any bot spam of the level of disliked. I still do see some from humans, but most of the time that’s people trying to populate a smaller community where they’re basically the only poster so far. There isn’t really any other good options to jump start most communities, since people tend to not post (or even know about) new communities until they’re active.
Report them.
Unpopular opinion: I think Lemmy is fun.
I hope this wont actually become an unpopular opinion. This place is pretty cool
You have the wrong community
Hey, this is supposed to be /unpopularopinion
Seems like it’s filling the same role as r/unpopularopinion perfectly then
If we’re being fair, I’m just parroting the exact same line that gets repeated whenever any unpopularopinion is actually pretty popular.
The unpopular opinion would be: due to having a far lower user base than reddit, bots fill a unique and necessary role on Lemmy that would be a thankless task for an actual user.
I’m witholding judgement, but I do think I’ve seen the same articles posted in several fediverse and it is getting old.
Lol
To some extent they can be useful
But yeah, I don’t need a one to one of reddit, if I wanted that I’d just be on reddit
With you. All these single upvote posts with 0 comments. Ban them!
All new post views are full of them.
Not unpopular at all, I personally think the weird political crap I never came across on Reddit is keeping people away more than anything. Never seen terms like “tankie” until I came here.
Probably didn’t see a lot of tankies themselves until you came here either, but lemmygrad and hexbear are where they live.
Mentions of them are abundant here because they are abundant here themselves and annoy everyone else.
Fr just the other day I came across a lemmygrad post asking if they should try one way defederations so lemmygrad posts can show up on other instances but non lemmygrad posts can’t show up to lemmygrad users and most of the post was basically just “we need to show everyone how good communism is while purifying our views” yea lemmygrads really are ignorant and just want to be a minor annoyance to the rest of us
I still don’t even know what a tankie is. It sounds extremely ignorant like referring to sex as hanky panky.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Hexbear with me, I’m no scholar. So I link to Wikipedia
A tankie came from people who defended the tanks in the infamous picture of that guy stand in front of a long line of tanks.
Those people claim to be communist and that China is awesome.
They’re lying about both tho. Their far right authortians, and far right authortians love nothing more than pretending to be anything except who they are.
They’re referring to communists. Originally the term was a slur for communists who approve of one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism.
Since the Reddit diaspora, I’ve seen it applied to communists, socialists, anyone who has expressed any criticism of capitalism, and users that others dislike. I think it’s turning into how Americans use “communist” as a pejorative: they don’t know what the word actually means, it’s now just a word for things they don’t like.
The communist pejorative has been dead for… Decades and decades. Like 4, at least. By the 80’s it had lost its charm, and young adults would roll their eyes when gramps used it.
There are plenty of other similar, (now-meaningless) pejoratives tossed about all the time. It’s old and tiresome to hear/see.
I’ve searched before, do you know why “tankie”? I can’t get a good etymology on it, like how it would reference single-party communist states?
Edit: hmm, Guess I missed the Wikipedia entry on it, though I could swear I’d read it before. Thanks Habiscus!
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From the US. Communist was tired 40 years ago. I saw it first hand, by the 70’s kids were already getting tired of it, by the 80’s the next generation just said “sure gramps”.
Yea, you still hear it a little today, but nothing like it used to be.
It’s this.
Lemmy has a significant amount of tankies which is why you come across that term and politics associated with them. It is the same way you come across conservatives on Facebook or reddit, and Nazis on Twitter. If you use any platform you will come across political groups in some shape and form.
What is a “tankie”?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and right‐wing factions as well.
this is what I’ve been going by cause I had to look it up as no one can be confirmed to give a straight forward answer on here that I’ve seen.
The common internet usage is simply communists who are willing to roll in the tanks. They’re accepting of a violent upheaval culminating in communism, which just sounds incredibly naive, personally.
Never seen terms like “tankie” until I came here
I mentioned this once and then someone became super unhinged at me.
I mentioned that someone became super unhinged at me and that person seemed okay at first but then started talking down to me about politics in general.
It’s fucking weird here sometimes and I couldn’t be further removed from anything “tankie” related but random lemmy users will still screech it at me.
Not an unpopular opinion. I don’t want to go to Reddit anymore.
They’re just aggravating. If I accidently click one I just regret it. There’s never any comments, I don’t want to click one and generate traffic elsewhere. It’s not just the reddit ones either. There’s a few other repost bots that direct elsewhere. They’re all bad.
The only thing I’ve noticed is a recent influx of people just shitting on poor people.
yeah! i’ve noticed really toxic shitty discourse lately. i wonder if this is some sort of astroturf? i know that inherently sounds conspiratorial, but it’s genuinely noticeable
I’ve seen it too, as well as propaganda either masquerading as or being so far left that they push pro-authoritarian bs.
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There might be some that are legit, but I suspect there are a ton of brigading trolls. Too many similar sounding comments, like bots on Twitter.
Talked to some knob the other day who was talking about ruling his small business with, and I quote “an iron fist”
Thankfully that’s not a common interaction but I do notice more hostile folks recently.
I know who you mean but I am fairly sure they are just trolling. MrBusinessMan or something… pure ragebaiting
It did totally feel like a troll.
