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.
Do not post everything twice. FFS. If I'm interested in a topic I'll subscribe to all the relevant communities for approximately zero hassle. Spamming feeds is just annoying and multiple identical threads make it impossible to follow the conversation. Quit it, please.
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Hexbear, the 8th largest Lemmy instance, cannot access !fediverse@lemmy.world. They have to access !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
On the other side, some users don’t want to subscribe to the .ml version due to the political background of the instance.
So in the end anyone posting have to do it twice.
That's exactly one of the issues I was pointing out in the post. There should be a unique !fediverse community. But as soon as you suggest this idea, people come saying that the only one should be their one (see above). Which brings you to the audience fragmentation.
OK, so defederation causes the problem. Having a unique community cannot solve that. But I'll forgive you for posting twice, if that is the reason.
As discussed elsewhere, having some kind of neutral instance with no user, a single !lemmy or !fediverse community, federated with everyone, could be a solution to this specific issue. Hard to implement, but on paper an interesting idea.
Think United Nations applied to Lemmy.
Yeah, a community overrun by fash will die. Not gonna work.