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.
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?
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.
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.
Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).
I completely get what you mean. Beehaw creates its own kind of situation. For a long time I was hoping they would refederate with SJW and LW, especially after 0.19.X where users could block instances on their own, but I guess that's never going to happen.
It's really a shame, because people and communities on Beehaw are really valuable
I mean, I get it. I saw the announcement that bad-faith posts from lemmy.world were creating so much moderation load that it was simply impossible for them to federate with LW and have the kind of community they wanted to have. And I thought, well that's kind of surprising to me, IDK what that's about. And then I started participating more heavily on lemmy.world and then I thought, oooooohh, that's what they were talking about. It all makes sense now.
Is sublinks what they're switching to? I was curious about that. I'm not real aware of a good substitute for Lemmy / kbin / mbin as of right now; it doesn't seem like there's a fully perfect solution available.
Beehaw is at least considering it. They'll probably poll their community once Sublinks is released, but if the mod tools are better there and the features are the same, I don't see why they wouldn't switch
I thought they had posted that they'd already made the decision of what platform to switch to, but weren't announcing it yet (which seemed weird to me). Sublinks honestly would make some sense given the Lemmy-compatibility and emphasis on mod tools, which I know was a constant pain point for them... but IDK if it's mature enough. But yeah if you told me they were waiting for it to mature so they could switch over, that would make sense.
I'm also very curious to see how (if at all) you migrate an existing server with all its existing ActivityPub keys and subscriptions to a new piece of software, on the same domain, without unfixably breaking its federation with every other instance. My guess is that they will switch to a different beehaw.(whatever) domain but I'm curious if there's a good solution I'm not aware of.
I’m also very curious to see how (if at all) you migrate an existing server with all its existing ActivityPub keys and subscriptions to a new piece of software, on the same domain, without unfixably breaking its federation with every other instance. My guess is that they will switch to a different beehaw.(whatever) domain but I’m curious if there’s a good solution I’m not aware of.
I’m also very curious to see how (if at all) you migrate an existing server with all its existing ActivityPub keys and subscriptions to a new piece of software, on the same domain, without unfixably breaking its federation with every other instance. My guess is that they will switch to a different beehaw.(whatever) domain but I’m curious if there’s a good solution I’m not aware of.
If the software you're migrating to is built to allow that to happen, it's absolutely possible. In the microblogging side of the fedi migrating between software isn't uncommon, though in nearly all cases they're forks from the same "family tree" so things work out mostly due to that, (Misskey is infamous for having a LOT of forks with most being capable of migrating to most, Mastodon can migrate to/from it's forks Glitch-soc/Chuckya/Hometown, and Pleroma and Akkoma can migrate between each other...).
There are software being built from-scratch to be migratable from other software (aside from Sublinks, Iceshrimp.NET comes to mind as a total rewrite of Iceshrimp, which started out as a fork of Firefish and therefore is in the Misskey family tree, but found the existing codebase to be un-salvagable) but it's definitely a rare case.
I mean, there's only so much you can do when your upstream is developed exclusively in Japanese (to the point the code comments are also in Japanese) with a focus on adding Reversi and a Suika Game clone into the software instead of refactoring so the same piece of code isn't duplicated in 10 different files split across the frontend and the backend and refuses to implement editing because they find it too hard when both major fork families (Firefish/Iceshrimp and Sharkey) have it and it works fine enough (alt text edits don't federate, but that's comparatively rare)
Hello, good to see you here! You will see, there are a few questions in the community about animating a community, feel free to comment on the ones you find interesting
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 am usually trying to encourage people to host communities on other instances (recently moved !casualconversation to !casualconversation, but sometimes it feels like fighting against the current.
I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn't have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does. Assuming the moderators are still active, the abandoned community can stay open to new posts (in case there are issues with the active counterpart).
I personally subscribe to both, so that I can get all the posts, but I post to the community I consider the 'main' community
I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.
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