Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on [email protected].
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 ([email protected] and [email protected] ) 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.
In the meantime, third-party apps can combine posts from multiple communities (that have the same URL) coalesced one single post, and pull comments from every instance’s post.
Automatic merging of that sort is problematic as each community can have significantly different rules, conventions, moderation strictness, priorities and overall “vibe”.
It can also make comment sections confusing where people talk about the comment section. When different viewers see different versions of the comment section (for example through different combinations of federation), it can be extra confusing to merge them all into one stream.
Yeap, this is the kind of improvement that needs to happen at the client level, not server.