Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

people having to subscribe to both to see the content
posters having to crosspost to both
comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

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[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

That’s part of the fediverse. It will be a obstacle for communities that will keep them from getting Reddit sized but decentralized means they aren’t supposed to get too big. I think the best compromise would be allowing you to create multi-communities on the front end or in the client.

But end users may not want to federate with Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml or overzealous moderators may ban a user on one instance and for that reason I’m not in favor of consolidating communities. I’d rather both grow organically

[-] C4d@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.

Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.