We have received numerous reports from users about the closure of the c/android community. While we fully support the original community owners’ decision to move to another instance, it will eventually be necessary to open up the community on Lemmy.world. The beauty of the fediverse is that multiple communities on the same subject can exist in different instances. However, if you can no longer moderate a community on Lemmy for any reason, it is important to pass it on to individuals who are willing and able to do so.
To ensure the best interests of our instance members, it is necessary to establish boundaries. Holding onto a community name cannot be a permanent arrangement. It’s important to consider our users’ ongoing interest in the community if they wish it to continue. While we acknowledge the objective of consolidating communities, current community members ultimately decide whether they wish to join the new community at lemdro.id.
To ensure a smooth transition, we will keep the community locked for another week, providing ample time to inform the active user base about the move to the new instance at https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected].
That is absolutely what you don’t want.
Let’s pretend you used to use Reddit. Let’s say you wanted to talk/read news about the latest video games. Luckily “gaming” exists. It’s a default subreddit (or it was at one point). That must be the best place to go.
Except… It wasn’t really. Some folks thought they could do better and thus “games” was born. So now we have “gaming” and “games”, two places to talk/read about video games.
Except… They weren’t really. While those subs had nobel modding goals it wasn’t long before they too had issues. No, only “truegaming” could really be the best community.
So now you have three communities, run by three different mod teams (or at least three different rule sets), “gaming”, “games” and “truegaming”. Which is the real community? Which is the best community? If you want to start a new community what word are you going to use? “RealGames”? “BestGaming”? “GamingGames”?
Look at this example. Android. I like the Android mods, but what if I didn’t? Or what if I think I can do better? Should I make /c/Androids or /c/TrueAndroid?
The nice thing about the Fediverse is that we can all federate with one another but no one is overly in charge.
Like the former Reddit Android mod team? Go sub to them in their instance. Don’t like the Android sub on this instance? Don’t subscribe. Think the instance admins have made a horribly wrong decision? Move to a new instance. (For the record I’m fine with the decision they’ve all made.)
Unlike Reddit there isn’t one big stupid CEO in charge. Instead there are a lot of small stupid admins in charge (and I do appreciate their work).
Now, as for solutions, yes discoverabilty for Lemmy should be improved. If I find one Android community it should be easy to find others, and not just communities named “Android”, but anything related across the Fediverse.
This isn’t all going to be solved in a day. Communities will fragment. Instances will fall over. New instances will rise. It’s a little messy, but we’ll figure it out.
I don’t see a problem with the example you presented. The three gaming-oriented communities you listed all have their own cultures that have essentially become tied with their branding, each with their own appeal. It would be more confusing to have three gaming communities all using the same name but with different approaches on how they manage their communities. At that point, you’ll have to create a guide on which instances would have the type of community that aligns more with your preferences.
I think having a guide or map to help navigate the different versions of each community is probably the most essential part to do this successfully. Now that I think of it, it might have even been one of the main causes of frustration at Reddit. It would have contributed to mod vs user tension when a user joined the wrong version of a community, like if they wanted to joke around more in a community that wanted serious discussion or vice versa.
I think a place with such a guide, plus the ability to discuss/evaluate/review mod teams and instances themselves (admins and all) would be helpful for the fediverse. Especially if admins pay attention and act on the mod team reviews because ultimately, I think communities should be about the communities themselves and not the person who happened to first register that community.
Having distinct branding through the community name would also help. Otherwise, you’d have to create a guide where the instance would be the main branding indicator for the type of community:
Ex.
Note that the actual instances can’t even be relied upon to be a good indicator on what type of community is hosted there.
Most of the time I see it as the user’s fault. People like to think of mods as mere janitors. But they’re also ultimately the one with power to steer the conversation to maintain the culture they want to foster (see the excellent /r/AskHistorians who are often vilified by the people who don’t follow their standards). Otherwise you’d have have multiple communities that are essentially just the same thing.
I’m not sure if I’m in complete agreement. I for one don’t like how a community can be owned by just one person. But I also don’t believe the community itself can be trusted to uphold a culture as the subscribers grow and change over the years. An admin can’t always be in the know to make the right decision for the community and may even make it worse.
I guess I’d say, without looking it up or visiting them, what is the difference between the Reddit communities gaming, games and truegaming?
If you have to look it up or visit them that’s fine, but if you have to look it up then there is no real harm in asking folks to do the same on Lemmy.
We don’t need a guide. Each has a sidebar, read it if you want. Each has content. Sub to the ones that look good, unsub from those that don’t.
The branding/naming convention alone would at least imply that there are differences in the communities (or there would be no reason why they were there in the first place). Each had their own philosophies on what type of gaming-related content they want to talk about. You don’t even have to read the sidebar of each sub to judge the type of community as the content association alone can be easily spotted even with a cursory look at /r/all.
But what happens when each gaming community in each Lemmy instance is largely similar, resulting to just the same type of content discussed ad naseum? People would just eventually converge on where the majority goes. The only reason why I would personally subscribe to similarly-named communities is if each community has a unique take that I both find to my taste.
no. decentralized communities die. no one wants to join the smaller communities, and if they do, they’re either an outcast or a contrarian, neither of witch are productive to any community. unless the niche communities start to enable communities to centralize across instances, everyone will join 1 mega instance, and everything else will be left to die just like what happens with every social media format.
I mean Mastodon has thousands of instances, many with thousands of active users and generally they all talk to each other.
The Linux community is wide open. Distros rise and fall. There was a time when everything was Red Hat based. Then Ubuntu came along and taught a whole new generation. Smaller distros like Gentoo got bigger. New distros like Arch appeared. And then some of us realized we actually liked just plain Debian all along. (Sorry Slackware users, I didn’t follow your journey). This didn’t happen because everyone chose the exact same thing.
Sure Linux distos have a commonality, same kernel (but configured differently) and same applications (but packaged differently), but we have that with Lemmy too. Lemmy speaks ActivityPub. Kbin speaks ActivityPub. (Also Mastodon). But Lemmy and Kbin have different UIs. In fact some Lemmy’s have different UIs.
And sure, a community can’t be zero people talking. But it also can’t be a billion people talking. And yes with Lemmy being newer it’s going to be easier to fragment. With only a few thousand active users per instance I understand the desire to stick together. But remember your not trapped on your own instance. Maybe we need two Android communities. Maybe ten. Maybe just one. I already know we apparently can support a shit ton of meme communities.
You’re fundamentally not understanding the issue here. Mastodon isn’t the same kind of content as lemmy, a link aggregator and forum. Microbloging doesn’t have user curation, it has algorithmic curation. The only control you have over your feed on a site like mastodon, threads, or Twitter is by who you follow and they just throw all of those posts into a endless list filled with disorganized nonsense. You don’t need to centralize communities there because there is no community to centralize. It’s like millions of people are in a room and they’re all shouting at once. Link agregators are the exact opposite of this. There is direct democratic curation superseded by moderation to keep communities focused and topical. You follow communities that will curate relevat content to their state topic and if those communities are not centralized you can’t interact with them as effectively if they were. There is no reason for any individual game or media franchise to be divided across more than just 1 page unless the amount of topics and content they can produce necessitates dividing specific facets of that community to not cannibalize the limited space the sites format allows for. Some games force esports content into it’s own subreddit and this severally hampers the visibility of that game on Reddit, or they divide out the meme posts because the sub is so filled with regular postings and discussion that they would get in the way and lose nothing by being segregated, unlike esports. Franchises like star wars don’t have posts about Jedi survivor or the old republic on their main sub because those games generate their own content that most people who don’t play those games do not care about. So yes, there are some reasons to divide communities, but there is not a strong reason to make more than 1 community for virtually anything on a site this small. There should only be 1 place to talk about Android here, for the time being, because there are simply not enough people to sustain more than that regardless of what your feeling on decentralizing communities are.
Decentralizing any community into small groups is exactly how you kill a community. People want to feel like they’re apart of a large group and that they can interact with everyone who shares that interest. It helps that community grow and by pushing them apart you’re essentially forcing them to choose what tribe they want to join and inviting tribalism when in reality they’re all the exact same people who we are dividing because we lack the technical capabilities to unite them.
You can be a member of as many Android communities as you want. You don’t have to pick just one. The community isn’t divided. They can even share 90% of the same people.
There is no harm in giving each instance a shot at running the best Android community. If all but one sucks, then that one will naturally be the one people stay subscribed to.
why do these 2 communities exist if 90% of their users are exactly the same? this isn’t a real scenario, this doesn’t happen. everyone congregates to the biggest group.
I’m currently subscribed to gaming/games on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and kbin.social.
Each of those seems to be an active community.
If users from one choose to all congregate to one, that’s fine. But if all three want to exist, that’s great too.
Some people post, some people comment and some people lurk. Yes, 90% of posters across three communities probably doesn’t make sense. But commenters? Lurkers? That’s probably fine.
yeah, enjoy seeing 3 copies of the same trailers and articles in your feed LOL.
Lol, that’s totally fine.
When a new game comes out I want to read the comments from “gaming”, all versions of it, and I want to read the comments from “gamedevs” and I want to read the comments from “newgamelovers”.
Maybe Lemmy can one day provide a “similar discussions” feature to highlight other communities.