I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.
The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.
Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.
Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.
@droning_in_my_ears it’s okay, you’re just still thinking in the old way (so are some of the commenters in here). Once you get your head around this, you’ll see it.
Okay here’s what you’re missing: the active users are active in multiple of them at the same time. Where something is hosted no longer matters.
Take my news as an example, I subscribe to world news on my own instance kbin.social and on lemmy.world, on beehaw, and on lemmy.ml. When I view my Subscriptions I see all of them in my daily feed and I vote and comment in all of them.
And on Kbin we have Collections (like multireddits) which means I also have a multi news feed with news communities from dozens of communities on many different instances.
The beauty of it is, if an instance gets ruined by a Spez-like figure it doesn’t matter because federation.
You do at the moment see a lot of reddit-like behaviour with users clustering in .world, but this is not actually a problem and confusion about “where everyone is” is just a growing pain. Communities will grow or shrink or develop, find their place in the fediverse ecosystem.
Eh it’s an annoyance and one Kbin/lemmy devs are working on improving. Kbin already now groups cross posts across instances, and there’s still more progress being made on fixing this issue.
Ideally it shouldn’t matter where you are, at current it does.
@Deceptichum I guess it would if it’s super important to you to be able to discuss any given post with the biggest possible number of people (which kbin’s crosspost feature already fixes, because it shows you how many comments are on an article’s crossposts and links you to them).
But I quite like some of the smaller discussion communities. Worrying about there being several on a topic isn’t any different to worrying about how reddit had several subs on the same topics.
Things are developing their own flavour already. It has to happen organically. I get the feeling from what people are saying that flaws in discovery is the main issue.
I do love the cross post thing. it was a great idea.
Good points, but hang on, I have an issue with the clustering. Let’s say I want to join something about “dice games”.
First challenge is to find out, what such communities could even be named. My search-fu is weak so I might only find one such community, but there are others, bigger ones. How could I find them?
Next, let’s say I find five communities on four instances. Wow, yay! Intuitively I would definitely want to join the biggest but I will also join the others so as not to miss anything. If everyone does this, it will never crystallise into one primary source.
That may be fine for reading, but what about posting? I don’t want to bother posting on all the damn sites.
In total, I really understand what Fediverse is aiming for here, but Reddit looked so much simpler. Like Linux (no coincidence I’m sure), Fediverse is a great idea with great features, but it’s juuust shy of being mainstream enough for the average Joe. So ultimately, the best community for my dice games… is Reddit?
@PlutoniumAcid first of all, you would go by most active not biggest subscriber numbers (which you can’t actually see accurately from within your own instance), and not everyone even does this, let alone joining everything.
Recently I made a multi for news communities so I could get an overview, and it’s definitely not all the same people in all the big ones (my instance lets me see the names of upvoters). People join what feels right.
I don’t get what you mean by this. I post all over the fediverse but I do it all from right here on kbin! That said, there’s no need. Why not just post in the communities you like most? It’s no different to reddit in that regard - you don’t feel pressure to post in all the subreddits, do you?
Eg outside my own instance I like the big movies over at .world but when it comes to global news I prefer .ml, but for sciencey stuff I tend to sub on mander.xyz.
True, for now. Full disclosure, I don’t particularly want reddit to move here just yet. It was getting too full of people who sound like my racist aunt. The fediverse has a feeling of chill still, people contribute because we’re having fun building something new, there’s no algorithms, shill armies, or enshittification.
I’ve been on the internet since the 1990s, so I’ve seen things rise and fall, and I think the future of social media is federated. I get enthusiastic about it, but of course it’s not ready for everyone yet, and realistically most older people may never even get here. But now I’ve discovered it, I’m never going back. :)
Actually mbin have fixed it and you can see accurate subscribers numbers from it on all communities
@Fitik thanks, that’s good to know! Useful.
At least on kbin, you can search for magazines(subreddits) either by names, or by names and descriptions, and then search only local(to kbin.social) or across the federated servers as well. So its really quite seamless.
Ask.
If you found one you’ve found people who would know about others.
If you’ve found none, almost every instance now has an askkbin/asklemmy/askwhatever, and someone there will know.
If no one knows, it probably doesn’t exist and you could make it yourself if you were so inclined.
both you and OP (and so so many others who are used to reddit, and capitalism in general, but I digress) seem fixated on constant growth, and more on the size of the community, than the quality of it. I think that’s probably an issue you need to resolve with yourselves, rather than try to apply it to something like the fediverse.