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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[-] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

people having to subscribe to both to see the content

Not a problem. Just subscribe to both. It's no big deal.

posters having to crosspost to both

Don't do this! The above "issue" already solves this. If I want to see posts from both communities, I'll subscribe to both communities. Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

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, otherwise the audience they want to reach won't see their content.

Posting the same content in both will cause me to see duplicates.

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.