For the unaware, is a alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes.
I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the past 6 months...
IDK, man. It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones. And the benefit you get, for asking people to take literally a couple of minutes of effort to sort out how to get involved with some particular topic, is pretty significant.
I’m not trying to say not to make good solutions to it, but also, trying to make everything maximally easy carries a significant down side, in that it attracts people who want to put minimal effort into everything (including their posts and their interactions with others once they’ve arrived on the network.)
I’d say it also turns off people who have expertise in other areas and would chime if there wasn’t so many hurdles.
Say an astrophysicist wants to connect with the community. Do you think they want to take time out of their day to learn the intricacies of a tool that otherwise has no use to them? Do you think they should have to?
This will inevitably keep this community gated from having a diverse userbase that Reddit has had at its peak.
The day we get 10 different people posting about quite popular topics like movies, then sure. But having the current split while there are 5 people posting for the entire platform seems counterproductive.
Another example I have is [email protected] and [email protected]. Both communities have similar rules, instances are similar, everything is similar.
There is one poster there that seems to prefer the programming.dev one, so I have to crosspost everything they post to the dbzer0 one so that people subbed to that one don’t miiss anything.
[email protected] is a bit similar. It’s mostly a one-person show (rough estimation, 80% of the posts are one person), but they wouldn’t move to [email protected], while we have discussion posts, active mods, everything.
So sure, it’s not that hard, but it doesn’t mean that people will do it.
I think I just see the problem as a little different than “how can we make things easy for people.” A lot of modern web design is “make it as easy as possible,” but I don’t think that actually always leads to the best experience. I really liked the take that the video I posted has on it.
If I had to describe the underlying problems with Lemmy, they would include things like “How do we stop anonymous accounts from being obnoxious” or “How can we put more of the control of people’s experience in their own hands, instead of having moderators being able to ‘override’ a consenting communication between two people who want to have it.” Both of those, I feel like, may actually involve making things harder for the average user to come onboard and figure out what’s going on, or navigate the system effectively. But then if they’re able to overcome that (honestly, pretty modest) obstacle, the end result is better. In my view that is ok. There’s other stuff than just making it easy.
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results. If there are multiple active communities, that’s not an issue, and there’s no real reason to homogenize them behind lizard brain FOMO. If there’s one active community and 6 dead ones, there’s no reason for users to find any of the dead ones.
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here.
This I absolutely would agree with. An option to hide communities that haven’t gotten at least X amount of activity recently, so you can find them if you want to, but there’s some kind of indication whether it’s [email protected] or programming@crickets x5 that you want to access, sounds great.
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization
No, it’s just consolidation of activity to a sustainable level.
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.
The “merging” in Proposal 3 would be mutually opt-in by community moderators, not forced.
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results.
Who gets to determine if a community is dead or not? That seems like a form of centralization.
It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones
Everyone will be different, but I can attest that these types of decisions do slow my workflow down:
Which communities could I post to?
Are there any communities my instance hasn’t federated with yet? (Check Lemmyverse.net)
Should I post to all of the communities?
Just post to the most subscribed or most active?
Post to the smallest and crosspost to the larger ones?
This can take more than just “a couple minutes”, and I’m pretty sure I am in the minority of users, even on Lemmy, who are willing to put in the effort.
Proposal 3 in the article seems to be an elegant solution which also does not give a single community all of the power.
Yeah, I’m all for making stuff smooth with these different proposals, I didn’t mean it to sound like I was not. I was just saying that making things easy is not always the best or most valuable of the goals.
IDK, man. It’s not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones. And the benefit you get, for asking people to take literally a couple of minutes of effort to sort out how to get involved with some particular topic, is pretty significant.
I’m not trying to say not to make good solutions to it, but also, trying to make everything maximally easy carries a significant down side, in that it attracts people who want to put minimal effort into everything (including their posts and their interactions with others once they’ve arrived on the network.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
I’d say it also turns off people who have expertise in other areas and would chime if there wasn’t so many hurdles.
Say an astrophysicist wants to connect with the community. Do you think they want to take time out of their day to learn the intricacies of a tool that otherwise has no use to them? Do you think they should have to?
This will inevitably keep this community gated from having a diverse userbase that Reddit has had at its peak.
There are only so many of us posting here.
The day we get 10 different people posting about quite popular topics like movies, then sure. But having the current split while there are 5 people posting for the entire platform seems counterproductive.
Another example I have is [email protected] and [email protected]. Both communities have similar rules, instances are similar, everything is similar.
There is one poster there that seems to prefer the programming.dev one, so I have to crosspost everything they post to the dbzer0 one so that people subbed to that one don’t miiss anything.
[email protected] is a bit similar. It’s mostly a one-person show (rough estimation, 80% of the posts are one person), but they wouldn’t move to [email protected], while we have discussion posts, active mods, everything.
So sure, it’s not that hard, but it doesn’t mean that people will do it.
I think I just see the problem as a little different than “how can we make things easy for people.” A lot of modern web design is “make it as easy as possible,” but I don’t think that actually always leads to the best experience. I really liked the take that the video I posted has on it.
If I had to describe the underlying problems with Lemmy, they would include things like “How do we stop anonymous accounts from being obnoxious” or “How can we put more of the control of people’s experience in their own hands, instead of having moderators being able to ‘override’ a consenting communication between two people who want to have it.” Both of those, I feel like, may actually involve making things harder for the average user to come onboard and figure out what’s going on, or navigate the system effectively. But then if they’re able to overcome that (honestly, pretty modest) obstacle, the end result is better. In my view that is ok. There’s other stuff than just making it easy.
That’s another improvement area indeed, but not thar related to choice paralysis linked to parallel similar communities existing
It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don’t need to find dead remote communities in their search results. If there are multiple active communities, that’s not an issue, and there’s no real reason to homogenize them behind lizard brain FOMO. If there’s one active community and 6 dead ones, there’s no reason for users to find any of the dead ones.
Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization”.
This I absolutely would agree with. An option to hide communities that haven’t gotten at least X amount of activity recently, so you can find them if you want to, but there’s some kind of indication whether it’s [email protected] or programming@crickets x5 that you want to access, sounds great.
https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] still gets posted to while the instance has been gone for around 2 years
No, it’s just consolidation of activity to a sustainable level.
Consolidation happened in the past
Those communities have no active counterpart, are they a threat to decentralization?
The “merging” in Proposal 3 would be mutually opt-in by community moderators, not forced.
Who gets to determine if a community is dead or not? That seems like a form of centralization.
Everyone will be different, but I can attest that these types of decisions do slow my workflow down:
This can take more than just “a couple minutes”, and I’m pretty sure I am in the minority of users, even on Lemmy, who are willing to put in the effort.
Proposal 3 in the article seems to be an elegant solution which also does not give a single community all of the power.
Yeah, I’m all for making stuff smooth with these different proposals, I didn’t mean it to sound like I was not. I was just saying that making things easy is not always the best or most valuable of the goals.