If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.
‘Stop asking this’ is not a really helpful thing to say. We have a lot of new users, including myself, and everybody is figuring out how Lemmy works. Redundant questions will occur and lets answer those in a respectful manner.
Exactly. I was subbed to both meirl and me_irl without issue
I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.
Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.
Lemme give my case.
I see what you did there.
Didn’t intend to do that, but hey…
Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it’s on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.
I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance
I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.
it matters a lot. if something is happening you want a quick overview of big discussion and not jump between a bunch of 10 small discussion rooms.
Reddit also has a bunch of homogeneous subs. Not a problem.
Yea, it’s an endless debate lately.
Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it’s possible the small clones will be left behind.
Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.
Duplication happens on Reddit too. It’s not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.
Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.
I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).
The real question isn’t whether it will be good/bad … it’s what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.
I think critical mass is needed for certain communities, and user splitting is bad for that.
In the early days during growth, yes I think you’re right. Adds to the frustration of people learning about federation and all that to.
Which gets to what we as the actual community members here can do to help in these early phases … share and collect information about what communities are gaining traction and which people should join.
For instance, there are two NBA communities I’m aware of, one on lemmy.ml, which is rather old, and one on lemmy.ml, which is very new. The old one is basically dead and everyone should go to the new one. I’ve posted this much to the old one so people know where to go.
Creating meta community communities for discussions around this can help too.
