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.

  • @severienEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    An instance hosting a community might

    become unstable
disappear forever
defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
same for the instances of other users of that community

    I kind of get this, but:

    • it seems premature to split the community “just in case”
    • this is largely a technical problem. IMHO communities should be federated in the sense that losing the instance shouldn’t automatically mean the community is lost.

    Communities can have the same topic, but differ in moderation style policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

    Also possible, but in most cases a large majority of community members can certainly agree on some compromise.

    Why are communities split? If you’re right and there’s really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often?

    • the lack of community federation
    • “my instance is better than yours” - which IMHO originates again from the lack of community federation
    • some mods just like the unrestricted power over their fiefdom