The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.
If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don’t feel like you need.
Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.
Adding an edit as I’ve thought a bit more: I think it’s important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are ‘unlimited’ options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.
This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.
I think it’s lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you’d like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.
I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there’s less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can’t universally squat on a community name
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it’s necessary to consider the part after the “@” to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There’s no such thing as a community named “No Stupid Questions”, with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for “multireddit”-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
Very well said. Great call out.
It’s a sticking point because it’s new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn’t a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That’s why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there’s a pretty significant chance you’ll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities…which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.
Except for when those communities have names that aren’t intuitive in any way, or the intuitively named communities are full of off-topic content.
I’m not going to say that reddit is the bastion of how to properly run a website. Clearly r/trees r/marijuana r/earthporn so on and so forth is super unintuitive, but until the concept of how the fediverse works becomes more common knowledge, we’ll have to help new members along. It’s taken me a little more than a week to even get remotely comfortable with how it works.
I only just learned today that I can’t see content from users on instances like lemmygrad because the instance that I joined has it blocked. I didn’t even really realize what I was doing at the time. Fortunately it’s something I also would have done, but my point still stands that its not something that’s immediately apparent or intuitive.
And you can’t see content from Facebook on Reddit, or from Twitter on Instagram.
The part that’s unintuitive is that you can see content from users on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
I think that magnifies the point I was trying to make as well. Not many people understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two separate “websites” in the same way that Facebook and Instagram are. They’re both associated with Lemmy and there’s no “Lemmy.com” per se.
Even doing this for a month now I still forget that a lot and treat posts like Reddit posts. Being a Kbin user, I have to constantly stop myself from replying to questions about Lemmy and app suggestions for features that I already have thanks to script mods. And that’s even with mods that highlight the post isn’t from Kbin!
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.
They’re different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you’re not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
For the record I don’t think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while
May be true, it doesn’t hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.
Indeed, there’s a viability threshold for a community, and it’s probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn’t doing any of them any favours.
But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey “Antenna” saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.
But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn’t one of them.
I don’t think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for “amalgamation” should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.
If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it’s not, as a significant number of members won’t want to amalgamate. And they shouldn’t have to.
At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.
Yeah let’s get to that million first before splitting everyone. It’s really not helpful in the current state.
And there are actually options besides “this is how it currently works so it’s good”. Like some kind of federated communities/magazines where when you post to one it’s posted to all of them. And I’m not saying it would be technically easy to implement, I have no idea, but I’m saying there are always room for improvement.
Near-identical communities/magazines with the same exact goal isn’t practical.
I think a lot of users on Reddit (including some who gave migrated to kbin/Lemmy) haven’t experienced a lot of the forum and IRC era of the internet.
As you’ve mentioned, “fractured” communities can actually be beneficial since each contribution is that much more valuable and nuances can actually exist between the similar communities. It allows things like the instance I’m on where I know I’m more likely to get a Canadian perspective in the communities on lemmy.ca versus other instances. To me that’s a huge feature over centralized platforms where those nuances would get drowned out.
There is no “the community”, though. These names don’t “belong” to any one specific group of people, there’s no “there can be only one” mandate.
As an example of why “there can be only one” is a bad thing, there’s /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn’t, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn’t like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got “taken over” by right wing moderators and those who weren’t of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community “Canada”?
You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the “real” community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.
But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it’s an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.
There are feature requests in both Lemmy and Kbin’s issue trackers for “multireddit”-like functionality, that might help when implemented.
It would help, but frankly I think there needs to be more - both because it would be helpful and because, up to this point, Lemmy is mostly following in Reddit’s footsteps in terms of features.
Consider a “multipost” option, on top of the existing crosspost. Multiposting something to another community would push the post as-is (no edits allowed) there, then collate all comments across all communities it had been multiposted to into one comment section displayed on all of them. The original community each comment chain originated on could be marked on the parent comment, and child comments could automatically be routed so they originate from the parent community of the chain.
Just spitballing here, but something like this would help bridge the gap a lot more than just a multireddit port.
Those two spaces had differing stances.
There also the case of InterestingAsFuck as opposed to DamnThatsInteresting, because why the fuck does “Fuck” have to be in the title?
But then there’s shameless karma-farming duplicates, like ComedyCemetery and ComedyNecromancy.
Starting up is always hard. Short of copying over a subreddit to a declared official new home (which did happen for a few), you have to build up from nothing. I think it’s come a long way in only the last few weeks. I’ve already seen a post complimenting the response time and answers from a Lemmy community when the Reddit posts went ignored, and also I’ve seen one community owner realize that the other communities of similar names are doing much better and decide to close up. Another group decided the best solution was not to try and pull in other communities, but act as a general discussion that also served to link up the many specific niche communities distributed throughout Lemmy and Kbin. Lastly the attacks on .world and .ml serve as a reminder of the benefits of having duplicity. What if one of those had been a long-time established home of a community with millions of posts and got wiped from such a thing?
This is evolution in action, what works best will prevail, and part of that will be redundancy and adaptive ability.
For your own awareness, cross-posting is available on Lemmy.
It seems to just copy the text with an intro bit, though, which doesn’t feel great.
Nice! Thanks for the info :)
This was really well said!!
I’m here from Reddit and that’s what I’ve been doing, just subscribing to whatever I can find for each subreddit I’m losing, and then whichever one seems like it’s either most active or has the most quality content stays and I unsub from whatever sublems aren’t providing content.
This OP seems pissed off about subbing to multiple sublems that are the same but like…you don’t have to. Go use Reddit? lol
The multiple sublems thing is kinda the point of Lemmy, there isn’t one big overlord controlling everything
Cross instance communities or a way to stich these places together better needs to happen though. Splinter groups making their own community is fine, but there needs to be some main communities for things.
It’s not just a make it more like reddit need. If lemmy.world decides to defederate like beehaw (or goes down), then all that content is gone from lots of other people, and the fediverse as a whole loses. If there exists a way to blend communities, then maybe people only notice less posts on memes rather than just an empty void.
It’s also a huge discovery problem, some people are going to think there isn’t an active NSQ community, and maybe try making yet another, because the didn’t find the one active community. It’s also possible that there’s 5-10 small/tiny- communities that could become a single thriving community of they were able to actually discover and coordinate with each other.
Discovering new communities that share names and topics will be the biggest core improvement in my opinion. Like having a way for an instance to poll all federated instances for communities with the same name or with a name that includes a term to easily add would be awesome.
Then the ability to combine them into subsets of your siscriptions by whatever topic you want would be awesome. Like instead of subscriptions as a while you could have ‘Tabletop Gaming’ with various 40k, CAV, BattleTech, and other games grouped how you want or subgroups for each game.