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.
Yes. And some people post to multiple communities and you get the same post twice unless your app handles this.
I’d be happy if it was only twice. I see the same posts 3-4 times, regularly. I’ve taken to blocking a lot of instances, but I feel like that destroys the purpose of lemmy.
Idk, maybe reddit will eventually design an app that’s not hot garbage, and I can return there.
You’re right. Especially for news articles I find that annoying. I could understand it if it was some personal project someone is really into. But posting the n-th article on the same topic in world politics into politics, world_politics, europe, … and then also repeating that in a community with the same name, just on a different server is a bit too much in my eyes.
Mmh. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Things like that only get more shitty. Have a look at the other social media platforms. And I think Reddit have revealed their true face, earlier this year. I don’t think I want to go back there. Maybe if I feel opportunistic and leave my ethics aside for a moment. But not full time.
I don’t think Lemmy will improve on things like this, soon. There are many more issues to tackle and I haven’t seen big (user-facing) improvements in the last months. I mean I still have bugs open for months now and the developers seem to be busy with other stuff. I don’t think cosmetic changes or bigger usability-improvements will happen any time soon. I can live with that as of now, but I’d also love to see Lemmy improve on several things.