Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

@[email protected] · 10 months ago

Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

@[email protected] · 10 months ago

If you want an example of community consolidation between different servers, there is [email protected] and [email protected]. Most of the activity if happening on lemmy.ml, and there was a backlash when the mods from the sub wanted to takeover the lemmy.world community. Both are still open, but someone who wants to post would see that the LW isn’t as active as the .ml, and post to the latter.

About your point, there are two things at hand.

First, the technical possibility of it happening. It has been linked elsewhere, the Lemmy devs are not interested in this. Kbin has it, somehow, but the userbase is now on Lemmy, and I don’t see it moving the Kbin/Mbin, except if they surpass Lemmy in features. Maybe sublinks will have this, we’ll see.

But beyond the technical aspect, there is also the “political” aspect. People who don’t like communities on LW are not going to enjoy being forced to have their content shared to LW communities too. People who avoid Lemmy.ml due to the political stance of the users are also not going to be happy to discuss with the people they are trying to avoid.

The point is that Lemmy has been around for some months now, people know each others, the other servers, and more or less where everyone stands. If people keep communities separated, there is a reason, and it’s not going to be solved by technical measures.

0x1C3B00DA · 10 months ago

the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

I know. I’m the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn’t it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

there is also the “political” aspect

Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

Your arguments against it seem to be:

Its not needed. - I’ve pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn’t happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don’t have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don’t know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you’ve centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
People might not want it - The proposal doesn’t force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities’ members.

I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that. Either the communities you’re in don’t join up with others or they do and you wouldn’t notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

@[email protected] · 10 months ago

Lemmy has been around for years, not months

Let’s be realistic here, the large majority of people came here around June last year. I knew about Lemmy before, it had a few hundreds users before that.

Everything about the proposal is optional. I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that.

Well, someone has to implement it. It matters to me because the developers of whatever platform we are talking about, be it Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, Sublinks, have limited time and resources. Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy due to the lack of moderation tools. This should be prioritized to allow more people to come to the platform, and have it as a solid alternative to Reddit beyond memes, news, tech and open source. To me, it’s strictly a question of prioritization, and that’s why I’m not in favor of dedicated effort into this while communities are already moving around organically.

0x1C3B00DA · 10 months ago

The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

I’ve seen ppl saying they don’t want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There’s also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they’re still filed on various projects’ trackers.

I think it’s higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don’t think we’re gonna convince each other so I’m gonna bow out here.

@[email protected] · 10 months ago

I think it’s higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don’t think we’re gonna convince each other so I’m gonna bow out here.

I guess not, but that was a cordial exchange. Have a good one.