I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:
- If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
- If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?
I was subscribed to [email protected], and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.
I think the happy medium will be front-end functionality that allows users to collate subs into “multireddits” and have easy access to their multis. The act of subscribing to new communities is not that hard, and interacting with them is more or less seamless on a full feed. The only time I find it gets tedious is if I just want a feed of niche content. It may indeed resolve itself over time, but for now it’s a bit annoying to track down my subs to 5 different woodworking communities across 4 different instances. The good thing about handling it optionally and on the front-end is that there’s no need to rethink ActivityPub at all and the feature would remain useful even if certain communities become the go-to for a given topic.
I would love it if Lemmy adopted Misskey’s ‘Antenna’ feature. It provides custom timelines based on saved searches.
Give us community and post tags, allow for custom timelines based on saved searches, and Bob’s your uncle.
The multi does not solve the fact that we’re going to see multiple similar posts on the same trending topic, with comments/discussions distributed among them. One of the things mods do on reddit is to exactly prevent this in each sub. Here, mods can prevent this in each community, but not solving the duplication in multiple communities of different servers.
In that case, we start getting into the “Lemmy is not Reddit” issue. Tildes is a “small by intention” reddit clone, and Squabbles is a “dude hopes to get rich” reddit clone, but both are self-contained; they have different issues than the threadiverse. For Kbin in particular, I have seen people noodling around with mockups on how to present identical URLs in a sort of nested way so the user can pick which discussion thread they go to, and that could be helpful, but at a certain point you either accept the annoyance of redundancy, possibly hoping it will fade as communities evolve, or else you unsubscribe from the source of that annoyance.
I mean, this is solvable by just looking at each unique group of communities and making an informed decision each time.
Some groups will likely result in lots of duplicate posts, in those instances don’t subscribe to the communities that are effectively duplicate mirrors OR pick the duplicate and try to grow that one if you prefer the home instance more.