Sometimes I question the fact that some communities might be too niche, but even on something as generic as !movies there aren't that many people wanting to talk about movies
I feel like Lemmites generally have a handful of interests: US politics, Linux, and Star Trek. I guess the war in Gaza gets a lot of comments too. But outside of that range, it gets pretty quiet.
Going back to Reddit every now and then, it's nice to see conversations on other topics.
I think some of this may be the default Active sort setting for the all/federated feed keeping some communities and their posts around the top. Might be mistaken, but my understanding is that it primarily elevates upvoted posts with recent comments, leaning on recent comments for keeping it visible.
Problem is, that means some posts that may get a decent amount of upvotes but no or few comments may gradually get buried, only rising to the top briefly or on some slower days.
I think as a result of getting buried, some may not see the other stuff they might want to talk about to comment on, and besides that, I sometimes get the sense there are a lot of lurkers around here, voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add or not wanting to risk getting into arguments (if not both).
You might be right, this is indeed a filtering issue. I use "New comments" on Subscribed, and then "Top X hours" on All, but people who use Active must definitely be missing on some.
What you did at the end can be a good approach tbh. Be curious and ask something about the post, or something in it that you're not sure of or familiar with, or if the OP hasn't added any body text or indications in the title and simply posted, what their opinion on it is, or if it's like a show/story/site/product, what's the premise or what's up with it and what they like about it.
Also if you don't want to focus it on the OP, in the absence of other comments, you can say as much like, "Do you (including anyone else reading) know/think [somethingsomething here]?"
I think part of the issue is there's multiple communities on different instances for the same topic. I'm subscribed to like 4 different movie communities. If we all just stuck to one, maybe there would be better engagement?
That's interesting, because I can exactly tell you why there are so many movies communities
!movies got created but is pretty much unmanaged. People on LW just post there out of habit, or because they support LW
there was historically a moviesandtv on an instance called lemmy.film. It was getting some traction, but then the instance disappeared
to keep another instance out of LW, people (including me) got involved into !moviesandtv. It was going well, but at some point I suggested to have discussion threads for current movies, and to engage more with the community. The mod found that "backseat moderating" and banned me. The details can be found in the spoilers in the OP here: https://lemmy.world/post/11446250?scrollToComments=true
I thus took over !movies, to kind of have that space to discuss movies.
I imagine there are similar stories for other communities as well which ends up with a bunch of fragmentation.
We narrowly avoided fragmentation with !lemmyapps and !lemmyapps. Some amount of consolidation is definitely a good thing especially since Lemmy's userbase is still small.
I even escalated the "power tripping" of the mod of !moviesandtv at the time to the admin instance, but their stance was that they didn't want to interfere with the moderation of communities, as that would be themselves powertripping.
I'm going to post to the LW community to advertise !movies at least
Dang, this sucks. I usually post news rather than open discussions so I never noticed. I had my own disagreements with lemm.ee admin back in the day which is why I'm on sopuli.xyz among some other things.
I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap. Something like beehaws's c/entertainment could work if parked at some instance that's federated well enough.
I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap
It might be, I just posted on !movies (not wanting to get another account banned on !moviesandtv ), we'll see how it goes
I don't think that's much of an issue to be honest, and even if it is, having a "large" audience able to see it from their local feed should outweigh the con.
Open discussions are always the hardest things to get comments and actual conversations in the comments, except maybe in the AskLemmy community where it works well.
moviesandtv exist, but don't really allow people to discuss movies and shows, it's mostly about news.
I suggested at the time to just have a pinned post like "what have you been watching", but got banned by the mod for "backseat moderation" (see below: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8381687)
The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don't have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can't just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don't have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can't just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
I'm curious as to how Lemmy apps solve this issue (which they seem to have done), and why the web interface doesn't have similar functionality. In Eternity and Thunder, I can tap on a link to a post on another instance, and it opens the corresponding post on my home instance.
Is there some lookup table under the hood to match post IDs between instances? Whatever system apps are using, why would this not work more broadly?
On Facebook, before I stopped, I tried writing well sourced political pieces and no amount of engagement was enough - when there was none it was... Annoying maybe, or disheartening. It made me think about why I was doing it.
I stopped posting on Facebook and I'm slowly moving to my own site and the fediverse.
So I'd say reflect on why you're doing it and hopefully align your actions or expectations with that introspection.
I haven't yet; moving from a Jekyll based blog to a different stack at the moment. Been doing a lot of digital migrations like to proton and such this past month.
I'll post it when there's enough on there to be proud of or worth showing. Thanks for the curiosity.
What's important is we never stop trying to connect, we keep pushing for meaningful dialogues and educating ourselves and our neighbors.
I do this for a few sublemmys like !nasa and !esa. I view it as keeping communities on "life support" until Lemmy grows a bit more.
One of the best practices I can think of is to cross-post a post with text in the body (important) from a small sublemmy to a large sublemmy. This creates a link to the original post on the smaller community, and gives it some visibility.
Do you think it would make more sense to have just one umbrella "space" community, on maybe mander.xyz (which already has !astronomy ), or even !space ?
Hmm, not sure I fully understand. Are you suggesting that each instance should limit the number of communities to a few general ones, or that the Lemmy network as a whole should limit the number of duplicate general communities?
That's more or less the idea. Fragmentation doesn't really benefit us except when the topic is that popular that conversations can happen in parallel (technology or news for instance)
lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.
lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.
taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.
I keep hearing about bad moderation, so I guess it's indeed an issue.
It is really a compromise, there is no ideal situation. Should we initiate something and ask people to leave LW due to bad moderation? That would probably be seen as unnecessary drama.
encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
My gut feeling is that most of the people on LW are comfortable there, and wouldn't see the point in decentralization. That happened in the past with the removal of privacy communities, or the fact that LW is still federated with Threads, still they have 18k MAU
and that’s absolutely fair. i think another group though are uncomfortable and are simply unaware that they can move.
for example, i saw a conversation where some folks were expressing uncomfortability that .world is federated with .ml. someone else brought up switching to an instance that was defederated with .ml (happened to be mine, shoutout .cafe) and they were all like “yo! dope let me do that”
so it’s almost a matter of education/spreading awareness for some at least
I guess I'm your person this week. I thought you had to create a new account to switch instances. The only time I've moved so far was from kbin.social to lemm.ee so I definitely had to but it's nice to know that if I want to move again I can keep the same account.
To be completely correct you will have to create a new account, but you can export and import your subscriptions and block lists from the new account to the new one in a few clicks
Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they're maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I've actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.
they are certainly stretched thin, which i would categorize more as an attackable problem than an excuse for poor performance.
i do have a few examples off the top of my head tho
!unpopularopinion was left uterly unmoderated for months. rage bait and even some downright nazi shit was almost constant on there. any community in that situation should have been immediately shut down by admins but was not.
!world mods have a nasty habit of butting in with mod flared comments on user reports without taking action. they defend this as “adding context” when the “context” involved is highly subjective, partisan, and verging on defense of harrassment, and not at all fitting the diversity of content that constitutes a “world news” community.
this might be more of a general lemmy problem but there doesn’t seem to be auto-flagging going on for common sense harrasment language? like i see slurs against races, ethnicities, and the mentally disabled almost daily and they don’t get removed for hours until a user reports it sometimes.
It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.
I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.
They have a strange issue with their frontend, the instance is still running, and can be accessed using other front ends, but as you can see, not the best experience for a new joiner
New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
It's a little less the case with Lemmy and other less popular fediverse stuff, but isn't a large number of vague/general purpose instances a contributor to this? In other words, wouldn't more focused instances help reduce this problem?
A big benefit of federation shines with topic-focused instances in that it ensures an already curated local feed to your main interest (or interests), meanwhile remaining able to connect with and discuss more general interest stuff via home and federated feeds.
Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.
Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can't be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that's why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)
Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it's immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it's not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an "official" Lemmy app doesn't even have "Lemmy" in the name, and doesn't pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.
The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances.
Or there aren't enough specific ones. If you go to Join Lemmy and you are presented with a number of general purpose instances, you are likely to pick the largest and only later realise the problems that entails and switch to another instance.
If you are a Trekkie or read books or game or program then it is easy to pick one. Ditto if there is an instance specific to your country (I should know).
If you look at Mastodon (which is more developed and has a wider and deeper selection of instances) you can see that these niches instances do well and I think we need to encourage more here.
I'm kind of giving up. When I came over during the Reddit APIpocolypse, I tried to post as much as I could. My posts here don't get much engagement, and only seem to reach a small audience, so it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.
I still try to post and comment, but it feels like a slog sometimes.
Completely get what you feel. I had a look at your last posts, at least the good a few comments, that's something.
Sometimes it's even worse, you post then all you get back is negativity. I just posted on !mildlyinfuriating, there are some comments which I just reported
Don't ever think it's up to you or any individual to carry the success of Lemmy or individual communities. Post what you think is worth sharing and don't force yourself if you don't feel like it. If Lemmy is to be more popular it will be on the backs of many people collectively.
Communities on big instances have a chance to grow. So once it gets big enough on something like world, they could put up a movement post and switch the community onto a smaller server. I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving. There are enough subscribers that some posts get upvoted and end up like with 25 upvotes in a hurry so they appear on the tops lists. Obviously, the more the community hits the top lists, the more people will see it and maybe subscribe to it.
I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving.
I would have thought that a smaller community would be easier to move, as there would be less inertia and inconvenience. I've deliberately created some communities on smaller servers and cross-posted to more general communities on larger servers to help with visibilty.
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