I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.
If the same story is posted in multiple communities, I’m only posting the first one I come across. Sometimes that becomes the next big discussion and other times it’s lost and another community takes over.
I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.
So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.
Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.
In my mind, the fix is that all posts to the same link should just collect the discussion all in one place, regardless of which community spawned it.
There may be a ton of good reasons that isn’t happening, but until there’s some sort of fix, centralization ensures you find a discussion and can contribute meaningfully.
I agree with the fact that a story of post should only exist once, as you said. I guess the remaining question is what to do where there are two communities for the same topic.
I have a good example that I just stumbled upon: !map_enthusiasts is the most active community about maps, has usually one post per day every day for the last few months. Once in a while, someone posts on !mapporn, and they instantly get a lot more comments than the first community.
!games is also quite active, despite not being on LW.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
I would prefer we didn’t give up on federation, but until the tools are in place to mechanically support it, I don’t see it as strictly beneficial.
A post a day in a community is a bot, more often than not, and trying to create discussion on bot posts often just falls on deaf ears.
I don’t see a reason to push for fragmentation at this time, but rather organically support active communities wherever they’re found.
I’d love for there to be a mechanical solution to fragmentation, so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.
organically support active communities wherever they’re found.
Makes sense
so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.
I guess at some points moderators of communities around a same topic will have to agree on where to host the community. The split between !android and !android still doesn't make sense to me today.
Sorry I didn’t mean to imply your specific example was a bot, rather my experience when I find a community with high post rates and low engagements it tends to be a bot.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars? The idea being that there's still some benefit to different moderation styles and community cultures/vibes.
Maybe also encouraging community moderators to communicate with each other more to figure out how they want their communities to be, how they might want to differ to create more distinct identities?
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars?
I think this is an excellent idea, and I have tried to do this with subs like !spaceflight. It would be great if this became standard practice, or a sort of reciprocal courtesy between communities.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, !spain is vastly different from doing it in, say, !soccerdrugs, even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.
I know, but this question is asked in the specific context where posters are mostly alone on a community for several weeks / months, where the LW equivalent has much more potential.
I don't like "big" instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews and !databreaches. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.
After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews and !databreaches and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.
So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn't be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.
Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.
You say that, but I recently had a comment deleted and got banned from a community on that instance. I wasn't being a jerk or anything. The mod was power tripping.
These things take time. I’ve saved discords in the past by making interesting comments or posts that created conversations. Lemmy is growing, and quality content attracts quality content.
I started moderating !animation about two weeks ago. I don't feel demotivated so far because it's still early days and I think it's a fairly niche topic. Especially among Lemmy's somewhat older userbase. On top of that the subscriber count has more than tripled during that time so I'm pretty happy with that. The one thing that frustrates me are the occasional random downvotes. I'm certain most of them are just by people not subscribed. I kind of wish there was a way to set it up so only subscribers to the community could downvote.
The 1 post that got a huge amount of traction and a lot of fun conversation (even though some of it was off topic) was a discussion question in the form of a meme. I wanted to try it out because on the ALL feed, the majority of the most popular posts are memes. It's not something I want to do too often because I don't want that to be the focus, but I'll probably do it from time to time in the hopes of getting more people engaged. And maybe pull some more subscribers.
Based on a quick look, from the best to worse: DuckDuckGo > Google > Quant > Bing
Unless search engines decide to integrate a dedicated filter to Fediverse, it will always be hard to search even if it's indexed. Cross posts, quote posts are not search engine friendly features.
Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.
For example:
I'm not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.
This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don't know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.
With hating videos I mean low-effort spammy crap. It's a decent format to explain certain technical aspects, but nowadays for every one good video, there's 20 bad ones, and I'd rather not have my feed flooded with crap.
If I want to watch stuff, I'll go to youtube or other platform. Lemmy is just a totally different use case for me, and I'd prefer to keep the two separated.
Just like I can't understand how people are using Lemmy for porn, but I guess from the sheer amount posted, there must be an audience. So I just hope I can fully opt out.
I'm torn on video support, but it's your typical I'm going to use it right, but I don't trust the masses to. 😅
I'd hate to see groups get filled up with posts that are nothing but a link to a video, but with me doing animal behavior and rehab, it can be hard to show some things with stills. Things like raptor hunting techniques and biomechanics need to be seen.
I'm all for having it not auto play or any of that annoying stuff though.
Right, I can see the appeal for some special purposes, but to be honest, external links to videos did just fine so far - and makes it easy for those of us who can't be bothered to simply block youtube.com and youtu.be as external domains, and done.
If videos make up the post itself, I can see my frontpage flooded with stuff I don't care to see.
And just for the record, I don't hate videos per se, I just think it's opening up the platform for very low effort posts. If you're writing an article about a highly technical topic and then link a video to visualize it, great. But if there's just a headline and a video, I might as well not be bothered at all.
I think alongside trying to foster more upbeat/constructive communities, it may also help to have a mixture of novel/different posts and if relevant, helpful posts.
For example, a few communities I've noticed are...
The first is definitely niche, second is maybe somewhere between, and the last benefits from being widely appealing, but what they each have in common is that there's something different to come across from their posts. First is satellite imagery, second courtesy of a couple posters is some weirder pocket knives, and the last is more or less like pics but with a bonus of being a variety of images you could use on your phone or PC.
A tricky part with each of these so far has been that despite some upvotes, you may not see posts from them too often depending on your sort setting as they don't often draw too many comments to each post.
That's interesting, I knew none of those before your posts. We definitely need a place to better advertise communities. I know !communitypromo and !newcommunities exist, but they are probably underused at the moment
I tend to agree. I think both of those communities are good for communities starting out or just opening up after adjusting some settings mishaps (e.g. whoops set to NSFW, mods only, or language settings), but they don't really fit for trying to get additional attention after that.
I made a small attempt over in General Discussion with this post encouraging people to share active communities, but nobody's added to it with their own lists of active communities or mentioning a single or couple communities they've been enjoying. 🤷♀️
Top 6 should show them. Are you sure the communities federate correctly with your instance? Have a look at them on their home instance, then from your instance, and see if posts are missing.
If yes, copy the link of the missing post, and paste it into the search bar. It should then appear and "unblock" the federation
You also might consider the occasional crosspost to !spaceflight, as I imagine there is some overlap in user interest. Would you like me to add a link to your sub in the sidebar?
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