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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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The big problem is Lemmy is designed to work against federation in every way. Communities must be forced into existence because you can't just casually post on your instances /r/knitting and expect anyone to see it.
For every community there has to be a "big community" to become established or else it doesn't exist in a practical sense in Lemmy.
And when it does get established, then the"big one" sucks the air out for all others.
This is a major architectural flaw with Lemmy that was inserted in purpose to concentrate discussion control power in the hands of centralized moderators.
End result, if you want to talk knitting, you'll have to go to https://lemmy.world/c/knitting
What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren't good with tech.
For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we'll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy's advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.
I don't have plans to visit other instances, manage multiple credentials.
Either I get to see it all from one place. Or these other places will functionally but exist for me.
If I subscribe to /c/knitting I mean I want every /c/knitting on every single instance in existence.
And I don't want to maintain a list of instances either.
I'm going to go to /c/knitting on the random instance I chose when I created my account and whatever is not there, does not exist.
Communities should not get fragmented on a per server basis. That's just going to encourage users to migrate to the one big instance that hosts the one big community
Duplicate communities should have been prohibited, or at least regulated, from the start. To me the problem is Why TF are people making a 2nd knitting community when one already exists? Instance theme isn't appropriate for the original community? Migrate it.
You're missing the point of having a decentralized network. As long as people are allowed to spin up their own instance, duplicate communities are bound to exist. You can view both of them or choose which one you prefer.
No, your missing the difference between can and should. We're in the fledgling stages of this Federation and already there are duplicate communities. How are these anything but an aggravation and hassle to newcomers trying to figure out what is where? You see freedom, I see obfuscation and dilution possibly to the point of absurdity.
Honestly, users that can't be bothered to check and subscribe to all knitting communities (which is really easy) will be snatched away from the first corporate alternative with more polish.
Open source applications rarely beat corporate ones in polish and ease of use; these aren't the battles we have to fight. Lemmy is already near identical to reddit once you sign up and subscribe to the communities that interest you.
You don't have to manage multiple credentials. You can visit and subscribe to /c/knitting on another instance as long as your instance is not blocking it, or blocked by it.
Would you? The point of having multiple instances is that
/c/knitting@gaming.lemmywill be mostly about knits inspired by gaming,/c/knitting@memes.lemmywill be mostly about knits inspired by memes and so on. You may not want all of them. This is a bit of a stretched argument, but I want to showcase an example where fragmenting communities on a per server basis can be useful.I know that for generic communities or hobbies it can be annoying, but it isn't that hard to find the largest /c/knitting and subscribe to that, no matter the instance. Reddit's centralized approach is more convenient, but we've seen the price we have to pay for that convenience.
Having multicommunities (either the option to automatically combine all communities with the same name across federated instances into one feed, or some sort of manual linking from the mod side where a community gets combined outward facing while still being hosted across servers with seperate mods) has already been brought up and would be a very good feature to mitigate this issue too. It's not something that has to stay impossible forever.