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].
This is why users need the ability to group multiple communities into supergroups
It can’t be on the users. The issue is that 2 communities can have different things going on, different rules, different events. The best way is to some how make hosting the same community across different instances by the same mods possible. Mirrored communities should be a goal, but tbh, it’s just not a real issue like the scalability, general useability, and how the hot page is not a hot page, it’s a rising page.
The best way is to somehow make hosting the same community across different instances by the same mods possible.
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.
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.
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.
- [email protected] - general games community
- [email protected] - memes about gaming
- [email protected] - serious talk about games
Note that the actual instances can’t even be relied upon to be a good indicator on what type of community is hosted there.
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.
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 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.
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.
They can even share 90% of the same people.
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.
What you describe as the “issue” is the entire point of lemmy and decentralizing and all that.
once lemmy starts dictating “oh you have to change things in this community in this instance to match this instance” and “everything has to follow one master set of rules” they become reddit.
honestly the best way to solve your issue would just be multireddits, if you wanna see content from both communities just add it to a multilem or whatever they end up calling it.
Lemmy is a link aggregator. Decentralization is the opposite of how link aggregators work.
They are two different things.
It’s like hangout spots. People congregate there. You can have a setup where everyone goes in to one place and from there they head to different rooms in that place and all rooms have their own rules and the place itself has its rules. If there’s a single place, that’s centralized. If there’s a collection of those places each with their own set of rules and rooms, that’s decentralized.
They each have their pros and cons (centralized makes it easier for people to find specific communities since they are all rooms in the same place, but means that you’re SOL if you don’t like the way that place is run), but both systems allow people (or links) to congregate.
its an internet forum, not a bar. you’re here to talk about specific topics, and when you don’t have enough people to do anything more than post memes or tech articles on 20 subs total, there isn’t a reason to divide any specific community.
Respectfully disagree. For example, [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are three communities on similar topic with different mod teams, and the culture of each community is a bit different from each other.
So, for big event like this one:
https://lemmy.world/post/1442053
You can access multiple posts across different instances on the same topic with one click using the crosspost links on Lemmy so it’s no less convenient than one megathread, and each post will have different conversations from each other, so it’s easier on the individual mod teams for the respective communities as well.
Whereas on reddit this would have been a huge monolithic megathread and would be very hard to manage without a huge mod team.
That’s the advantage of decentralization.
The entire point of link aggregators like reddit and the threadiverse is to centralize discussion and curation. These sites lose utility if you have many different places for the exact same content.
Then I’m not quite sure why you would expect centralization on an explicitly decentralized network of forums on the Fediverse.
i expect centralization in the way communities work, not in the way instances work. if you want to host a link aggregator, you’re building a platform to centralize discussion and content, if lemmy does not work towards that goal of uniting communities across instances, it will fail because no one wants to join 20 small communities to get the same information 20 times over in their feed. this is antithetical to the utility of a link aggregator forum like reddit or digg, and that’s what lemmy is trying to be.
Then would you like to go ask the good people at lemdro.id to close their Apple community and centralize it over here please?
It doesn’t make sense to me to do so, but if you want it, more power to you mate.
i don’t think you understand what centalizing communities but not the instances means. the communities need to exist within lemmy, not within the instance. tieing communities to instances means for a given community there are dozens of copies, none of witch are integrated unless the users use a crossposting feature that no one understands and doesn’t make any sense from a moderation standpoint. users and communities need to be unattached to an instance so they can become less isolated from the people who want to be apart of that community but use a specific instance for whatever reason.
What I would want is for both communities to exist in parallel, and users can have the ability to have a grouped view of both communities together in a single scroll page. Then posts can still be addressed to one or another instance and would need to follow the local group rules.
Basically folders of favorites that you can view in your home page.
@dmmeyournudes @MargotRobbie True. And I like it more.
I’m not talking about each page to merge together but rather a way for viewers to group them into a single scroll area kinda like you favorites home page. Then if you want to post, you still would need to chose where you want it published and you would still need to abide to the rules and moderators choices. Each post can still be labeled with its origin.
Basically having multiple folders of favorites would be a different way of insert what I’m talking about.
Yeah, like some kind of custom subscription group.
Would it be alright if a client app handled this logic? Where you can sort communities organize communities in a folder like interface to customize your “all” feed?
It’s would be okay, but then it means that you would have to commit to browsing on a single app instead of having your preferences carry over if it was implemented within Lemmy itself.
That is true. I am immediately thinking that creating an export of that data of some kind would be possible. But, it would require lemmy to understand this map or other apps as well. There could be a standard created of profile preferences in the future hopefully.
Yes. All it has to do is store a JSON with a standard format.
Yes. All it has to do is store a JSON with a standard format.
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Disagreed. I hate cross posts because people just end up posting the link to every community they can convince themselves it’s tangentially related to. If it’s important enough to discuss in a different group, people can take the time to go post it manually.
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I have been deliberately crossposting patchnotes / update announcements for games between a larger general gaming community and the individual communities for each game. I am doing this in the hopes more people that play these games realize there’s a community for them on Lemmy and join, so they become more active.
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that or move communities to other instances.
Will the old group of moderators be removed and replaced?
The old mods have already left - the problem was that they locked the lemmy.world community behind them on the way out.
I know when this all started, there were some people who volunteered to reopen the community and mod it, and contacted the admin to that end. I assume this announcement is the resolution of that - when the additional week is up, the original lemmy.world community will reopen with the new mods.
So if the new community is still federated with lemmy.world, if they reopen this instance does that not make things overwrite each other or would they have to defederate themselves from lemmy.world?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. New to the fediverse and lemmy in general.
No - they’re entirely separate.
Basically the way it works is that you never really leave the instance you’re on. When you access a community hosted on that instance, you’re of course on that instance. But when you access a community that’s hosted on another instance, you’re actially accessing a mirror of that community that’s hosted on your own instance.
So for example, from your point of view, coming in through lemmy.world, the two entirely separate communities are [email protected] and [email protected]@lemmy.world. The first one is the lemmy.world community snd the second one is a local mirror of the entirely separate lemdro.id community.
Hope that makes sense …
Kind of, I still have a lot to learn.
So lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are two separate instances right? And then the communities on those instances are like subreddits for lack of better terms?
Think of it like email.
The email provider is the instance:
Google, Yahoo, outlook, etc
The community/user is your email address:
Android@gmail, Android@yahoo
Because they are different providers you can have the same name since it’s the only one on that provider.
@nosut @ThatGirlKylie I am on both lemmy.world and mastodon.social and it works like a charm
A subreddit can be uniquely identified like this
/r/games. Once that name is taken, no other sub can have it.A Lemmy community is identified like this: [email protected]. Notice it has a name part and a server part, both are necessary to uniquely identify the community. [email protected] is a different community with different mods and different posts/comments (unless someone crosspost, but then it’s still two different posts with mostly the same text inside). You can mostly access any community on any server from your account, mostly irrespective of what server your account is on.
But similarly named communities on different servers are different communities. They are analogous to /r/DnD vs /r/dndnext. Similar topic, different subs, same with those Lemmy communities.
Yeah:
Instances = Servers
Communities /c/ = Subreddits /r/
Basically, yes. And it’s not too much of a stretch to think of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml as two separate Reddits that share with each other, so anyone on either one can access stuff on both.
So two communities that both have the same name but are on different instances are actually two entirely separate places since they’re on two entirely separate “Reddits”. One is [email protected] and the other is [email protected].
Yes, essentially.
Tangentially related doubt -
Given two communities A@hostone and B@hosttwo, and a user U1 registered on the hostone instance and a user U2 registered on the hosttwo instance; imagine one day hostone goes down - server error, too many users, whatever.
Can U1 access B@hosttwo? Can U2 access B@hosttwo? I’m assuming that neither of the users can access communities on hostone on account of it being down.
Thanks in advance.
User U1 couldn’t access anything, since their account is at hostone and hostone is down. But they could log in with a different account on a different instance (or just lurk without logging in) and be fine.
User U2 would be almost entirely unaffected, since User U2 is on hosttwo, which is unaffected. B@hosttwo would be entirely untouched, and User U2 would even still be able to access A@hostone. Sort of.
All along, when User U2 accessed A@hostone, they were never actually accessing A@hostone directly - they were actually accessing a mirror that’s hosted on hosttwo - A@hostone@hosttwo. So the only effect of hostone bring down is that A@hostone@hosttwo wouldn’t get any new content from A@hostone (or from any of the other federated mirrors - A@hostone@hostthree or A@hostone@hostfour and so on). But all of the content that was already at A@hostone@hosttwo would still be there and could (presumably) still be accessed. New content could (presumably) even be added there, but since it wouldn’t be able to sync back up with hostone, it wouldn’t show up anywhere else - it would just be at A@hostone@hosttwo.
And a note on those (presumably)s - internally, the lemmy/kbin/whatever software would recognize that it was failing in its attempts to sync with hostone, and likely that it was failing to even contact hostone. I don’t know how the assorted pieces of software - kbin or lemmy or mastodon or whatever - handle that. If they ignored it and just kept trying to sync with hostone and failing, then User U2 might not ever even be aware of the fact that hostone is down, since even A@hostone@hosttwo would look the same - it just wouldn’t be syncing with hostone, so wouldn’t be getting any new content from there or from any of the other federated versions of A@hostone, and User U2 might eventually notice that.
It’s also possible though that the software could be set up to tell User U2 that hostone was offline, and it might even be set up so that it would refuse to accept new content at A@hostone@hosttwo until it could get back to syncing content with hostone. I don’t know why it would be done that way, but it could.
That’s brilliant, thanks for the in-depth answer.
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If they’re not interested in moderating a community here then that’s really the only solution.
I agree. They publicly declared their intent to abandon the community. Which it seems they have already done. There is no purpose in keeping them around as moderators if they no longer have any intent in moderating. The only logical conclusion is to find new mods.
They are currently removed, which is good as they can’t do any further damage.
Naw this place isn’t run by corporatist pig faced savages
I’m not sure what that means.
Was a joke about Reddit admins but I guess it landed wrong. I was describing spez
Thank you admins, but it’s only fair if c/android members are informed of this, as the current sticky notice there is, in the light of this thread, totally misleading as it gives the impression that 1- the community “officially” moved (not true, only one mod “officially” moved, but he wanted to also prevent those who didn’t want to follow him from participating on [email protected] altogether) and 2- that it’s permanently closed (not true, again in the light of this announcement). The current sticky is just false.
Current members must explicitly know that the community will reopen in a week (though I disagree that this “waiting period” is even necessary, since that moderator already forced more than one week on us) and that if they want to stay they just have to wait. This announcement needs to be a sticky thread in [email protected] too.
Thank you. A message will be posted soon in the Android community. Good catch to make sure everyone is informed.
Can someone do a ELI5/outoftheloop type summary for me? Why did the mods leave? Where did they go?
The mods from r/Android started their own Lemmy instance called lemdro.id. Among the communities they opened was c/Android. There was already an Android community on Lemmy.world the was active with 15k+ subscribers.
The mods decided to merge with the communities and move over to lemdro.id in the hope to fight fragmentation. They locked the Lemmy.world instance to keep as an archive. And now we’re here.
I’ll add the post they made in bit.
You forgot to mention that they literally asked no one here if that’s what we wanted and arbitrarily closed the community like a Reddit mod would typically do and the whole fucking reason we all came here to avoid in the first place.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I wasn’t happy about it either, but I was just answering objectively.
Thank you, the mods in question explicitly doubled down on the fact that the lemmy.world members deserve no say in the matter and that Reddit’s holy “moderator discretion” needs to be respected on lemmy.world too. Everyone needs to understand that it wasn’t a community that “moved”, it was a single moderator who decided to move. You just cannot call it a “merger” in that case no matter what obscene power moves Reddit allowed in the past.
Didn’t the android mod team here have multiple mods? If only one decided to move then why didn’t the others keep the community open?
There were only two mods, and only one decided that, since he himself admitted explicitly that it was his decision alone to forcibly close the community.
Both of the moderators supported the move to consolidate and their announcement thread was widely upvoted.
I wouldn’t call around 400 upvotes, with almost 100 downvotes, as “widely upvoted” when other threads easily got thousands, after forcibly closing the community and leaving only that thread up there. If anything, the fact that after almost 2 weeks of you obsessing over the upvotes, since you brought it up multiple times, it got such a pathetic upvote count despite shutting down any critique by closing the community is another blow to you. You’re grasping at straws and you should give up defending this shameless power hunger move that is characteristic of Reddit. Your move was forced by one single mod who himself admitted it, end of the story.
Since you love obsessing over the upvote counts, the comments denouncing your power hunger on Reddit when you decided to ignore [email protected] and create a duplicate community in the beginning got thousands of upvotes, but since they were inconvenient you deleted them all.
Also, still to satisfy your obsession over upvotes, this thread got 200 upvotes, almost no downvote, in only 2 days. We all can see why 1- no one really wants to go back to powertripping Reddit mods and 2- why you needed to force the closure, as you knew no one would voluntarily join you anyway.
It’s really bad taste to still intervene here with an alt after what you and the other mod did. What you did and how you still defend it to this day is just shameless.
You know what else is characteristic of Reddit?
Immediately launching into assuming any moderator is horrible and organizing some kind of conspiracy, not ever acknowledging that people could be acting for a reason other than malice.
Anyone can be a moderator. Only a small handful of people can be good moderators. And a small handful of those good moderators act selflessly for the benefit of communities instead of making the communities their pet.
Thank you for that!
No problem 👍
The mods decided to merge with the communities and move over to lemdro.id in the hope to fight fragmentation.
I get the fragmentation thing, but it’s Lemmy. Fragmentation is kind of the point. I think closing the community, while something the creators can freely choose to do (as long as the instance owner is okay with it), it’s not a very democratic decision. Make the other instance better and give users the right to choose.
The reasonable solution. Understanding that locking it forever would be depriving this instance of a once active community that people have volunteered to mod, but respecting that the original point of that mod team doing so was to try and consolidate instead of creating a competing community.
My only concern now is that some of the people actively trying to escalate the whole situation into an attack on the previous mod team may be the ones running the place. I hope that isn’t the case.
I totally agree with this! It’s going to prevent a whole bunch of cybersquatting.
That’s great, thank you for this.
Fair and reasonable
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Thank you!
