Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
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.
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.
I didn’t mean to have every community on that instance.
Just to have a single Fediverse community on one instance that could be used by everyone.
People shut down / buy out that server? The community falls back on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
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.
As as I said just below, I didn’t mean to have every community on that instance.
Just to have a single Fediverse community on one instance that could be used by everyone. You wouldn’t have user registration on that instance, and as such it would not have to replicate any of the other communities except the local !fediverse one.
People shut down / buy out that server? The community falls back on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world while we figure out how to deal with the situation.
It’s kind of similar to what people are trying to achieve with lemmy.film: a single instance on one topic, federated with as much instances as possible. To get discussions in one active place rather than scattered across dozens of communities.
Spreading communities across as many instances as possible is no doubt a good thing, but it doesn’t really solve the forking problem, and “the community can fall back on x or y to figure out what to do” demonstrates that pretty well - if a third instance is set up to replace those two communities, then that third instance breaks down, which of the two (or, let’s be honest, more than two) different instances/communities are used as the fall back, and how is that communicated to users who likely don’t even understand federation?
For federated communities to win out over monolithic platforms, they really need to reduce the power held over communities by the instance administrators - seamless migration of communities and user profiles between instances is a major gap in Lemmy - and make it almost completely transparent to the user. The user shouldn’t really at any point see much of a difference between Lemmy and Reddit, for example.
Very good point
I agree with you completely and kinda assumed this was already in place tbh.