The underlying problem here is the lemmy community being spread out across many instances, and this solution doesn’t really fix the underlying problem.

This is just speculation, but I think eventually 1-4 instances will grow much bigger than the rest. I think when this happens, communities will become much less fragmented and the problem will solve itself.

tl;dr while this is a good idea, I think if we just leave everything the way it is the problem will solve itself.

I tend to agree with your take on this. I’m getting serious FOMO over here and over-subscribing because I don’t know which sub will be the one to “take off.”

I honestly wouldn’t want that, a feature like multi-reddit would be much better IMO.

I personally don’t want to be “automatically” subscribed to all tech communities for example just because I joined one, nor I want to be flood by an immense feed because all communities of the same type are put all together, that takes away individual choices IMO.

We had exactly the same problem on reddit, but multi-reddit solved that very well by leaving the choice to individuals instead of being forced by admins.

EDIT: for those who don’t know, multi-reddit is a reddit feature that allows you to create different “labels” into which you can combine different subreddits, which label to create and which subs to combine is totally a user choice, those labels become “tabs” into your UI that you can use as they were individual subs.

So for example, I can create a label/tab called “linux” and use it to combine r/linux + r/linuxmx + r/xfce, etc., than I can create another label called “games” and combine r/MMORPG + r/wow + r/guildwars2, etc., and so on.

multi-reddits can be private, that is only the user who created them can see them, or they can be made public, so if some user doesn’t want to create their own, they can use multis created by other people.

Why not make this purely client-side? Give me the option to merge what I see as like-minded feeds into one feed. Label it and be able to scroll it as one feed. All without the need for admins or instances to do more work?

Hmm, I don’t disagree with the fragmentation but that’s the nature of any new social platform. It’s also been proven out that eventually one or two communities for a topic will become the dominant one with the others falling into disuse.

Attempting to merge communities early or artificially will cause moderator strife as minor disagreements balloon. Especially in a multireddit community where no one mod(team) has absolute control.

I don’t have a reason from a technical point of view, but from a social one. Forcing communities and instances together early will only cause strife. After a few years where two communities have a track record and proven ‘behavior’ would the multireddit not cause issue.

I would kill to just have some help/pointers figuring out how to navigate this… Fediverse?

I’ve made a couple posts, on one, maybe two, um, Instances? In the communities there?

I don’t know. All this change is coming at like, the WORST time in my personal/professional life and learning a whole new world is just… Daunting. (waahhhhhh 😭)

I don’t see any problem. If the problem is the server admin is not able to moderate the communities, he can disable automatic community creation and define an approval process. He can also close dead communities, apoint moderators, merge proposals…

I think it would be really nice to have a “fediverse map” for each server, to show where they’re connected to and what instances are endorsed back.

Would make finding new servers/communities easier too

I think you perfectly described my issues with comment sections on Reddit for the last few years. That attempt to appeal to an audience rather than further the discussion.

I used to love comment sections as much as, if not more than, the actual post on Reddit. It felt more like a conversation that had insight and humor. It got too big for it’s britches and became that soulless monolith.

I get an almost nostalgic vibe from this place. It’s nice.

I like the general idea of merging communities, but I’m not sure if I like the idea of it being automatic. What if instead communities could apply “hashtags” for their community, and then you could efficiently browse multiple communities at once. For example, I’m subscribed to a few different TTRPG communities across a few different instances, but what if each of those communities was tagged “#ttrpg” and then I could browse #ttrpg instead of browsing any of those individual communities.

How will this help the posters reach the fragmented communities? Will they just pray that everyone is using the the aggregator?

I like multis and I think discoveribility is a bottleneck, but I’m very wary of this idea. If you merge communities together like this, you essentially multiply the users in that community. Moderation isn’t 4 small instances anymore - it’s one large one with 4 separate mod teams each handling a quarter of the posts

I think this is more likely to lead to polarization and eventually echo chambers than if you kept them separate - outrage drives engagement more than anything else, and explosive growth is a great way for a fraction of the group to dominate the first few pages of comments, which turns off moderate voices, which works like confirmation bias to make the outraged believe they’re the prevailing voice of the community, which again drives them to post more incendiary comments, and the whole thing spirals

If you want to avoid echo chambers, the best way is to throw a small group together and make them get along through mods that are involved in the community

But then you’d probably end up with most members of one community slowly joining the rest, which is a healthier growth model, but still not great

My intuition is that the ideal solution involves encouraging users to join a single smaller group, but being exposed to top posts from sister groups to avoid fomo. Possibly through something like the way Reddit handled crossposts, where you get the post but not the comments, and a small link to the discussion in other communities. It could be automated if the post crossed a certain threshold of votes, keyed to a certain deviation above the daily average of the original group and optionally with a minimum up/down vote ratio.

This would help keep moderation ahead of participation, and hopefully build a tighter knit community - people are less willing to be jerks to people they recognize than strangers you get in a larger population. By encouraging users into one small random group instead of shopping around for the one that best fits their view, I think we could resist natural grouping by beliefs.

To go further, if this works we could consider a mechanism for “mitosis”, a splitting of a group when the mod team feels the culture of the group is getting past their ability to manage in a nuanced way

The goal is decentralization after all, not distributed centralized groups

How about a mod option to voluntarity merge another community into their community?

The problem is not a technical nor architectural problem but a user/usability issue.

Look at the workflow how people create a new community. They are registered on one instance, probably fixed to that bubble and probably don’t interact with other instances at all (subscribing to other communities is a pain. Other problem.) They might (if at all) search for a similar community on their instance. If they don’t find one, they’ll create a new one. Searching every single community is not implemented in this flow. You need to call up feddits search to do so.

My suggestion: Either do a name (fuzzy) check when creating a community, listing the ones already existent on other instances. Or at least implement the search feature from feddit.

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