Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.
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.
join a meme sub
get joined to 15 meme subs
every meme is posted 15 times
surprised pikachu face
15 surprised pikachu faces
ftfy
I like this idea, however it would need to be intuitive to use and clearly advertised as a feature with a plain explanation up front. I say this because I’d never heard of this feature before and I used reddit for over 15 years (had to Google how it worked after seeing your comment).
Yes, users need ofc explanations, but that can be easily done, as much as people here are trying their best now to explain people the fediverse, that is quite more difficult to grasp IMO than a multi-reddit feature.
I am in this picture and I don’t like it. Lmao I literally had a multi-reddit called Linux.
I like this idea better, also it shouldn’t be as hard to implement?
Exactly. Just because I join a US politics sub doesn’t mean I want to join all US politics subs. The fact they are separate means I can find one that fits me. If this was reddit, joining /r/moderatepolitics would automatically sub you to /r/politics. Fuck that.
How about a mod option to voluntarity merge another community into their community?
This would be great
Damn, this is a lot of discussion and I don’t see a single person actually volunteering to actually go code the feature. It’s open source, you know? If anyone cares about the feature, go learn rust (like I’m trying to do now) and code it up.
EDIT: In case anyone reads this, please look at entitlement in open source. It’s an eye-opening read for those not familiar with the headaches involved.
I’m honestly more confused than I was before. With so many opinions, I don’t know how this could ever be implemented in a way that satisfies people.
It’ll be solved the same way anything gets solved in open source: those that can code make the final decisions.
Give me the few years I need to grasp how Rust actually works lmao
Open-source? More like open head from the SKULL SPLITTING HEADACHE!
Instructions unclear: do i put in the skeletons mouth or not
Thanks for the article. I really like the overall message about maintainers setting strong boundaries and being able to walk away.
I love open source. And it is so sad when good projects hit snags because of a toxic user-maintainer relationship.
“An ounce of planning is worth a pound of cure.”
Nothing wrong with rushing into projects when you’re learning a new language, but on big OSS projects it’s a good idea to make sure you’re working on something that the maintainers are willing to merge. Getting community consensus is a good thing.
I also started to learn rust for the same reason.
“Just go learn Rust”
Yeah that applies to a handful of people.
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.
Isn’t a few large communities eating up the others like the opposite of what Lemmy is trying to do?
i keep hearing people call for this like its going to happen and be the only way things will be. Look at reddit, look at the history of some of these subs.
there will always be multiple copies of various communities. what software gives us the ability to do is sort and filter and tag (we need to add this) to our hearts content so instance admins and users have control over what comes across thier feeds.
Joined communities will have many of the same centralization problems reddit has now. I’ve seen this call mostly from users who were on reddit long after it was large. It seems many have no idea that almost every topic on reddit has 4-6 subs around it usually.
Indeed - what you describe is why I’m really not worried about fragmentation. Federation means you’ll be able to see all of the relevant communities, and you can decide to subscribe to any or all of them.
In a community with 5m+ members, everything moved too fast
If people are satisfied with them, I think that’s OK, and more efficient than having a zillion.
Problems will happen if we go too low, and bigger instances start de-federating. Some might be tempted to start monetizing like Reddit.
I think it’s only a problem if it congregates to 1 instead of 4 or so. If one of the 4 goes rogue or disappointing its users, people can easily just jump on a different one. Most servers will suck and that’s ok. Good ones will attract users.
Yeah, but we are social animals. Everyone* want’s to join the big group!
The example of federation most people have experience with is email. There will almost certainly be gmails and yahoos emerging over time, but they will have limited control compared to reddit, because if you don’t like the filtering/advertizing/whatever of one you’re free to leave for another
The email analogy breaks down when you consider that most email servers are run by big tech and cost a lot of money to upkeep
Or you can run your own email server for yourself and a few of your family.
There’s almost nothing in between gmail and some random person’s self hosted email server.
In terms of the fediverse,who the heck is willing to host a lemmy server for 1 million complete strangers? Not many people i think
If Lemmy takes off I wouldn’t be at all surprised if tech companies hosted instances that they monetize through advertising, and many people would be willing to have a home instance that showed them ads in exchange for high stability and potentially more user-friendly clients
They’d still have to release the source for their modded versions with ads, thus, ads can be mitigated from the instance client/app side.
Not necessarily, there are several ways they could release a proprietary app: either code it from scratch so they own the copyright, use OSS code that has a commercial-friendly license (eg. MIT), use an OSS library that allows them to link with their proprietary code (eg. LGPL).
But even if they did release the source code, I think they could still be profitable. Their main customers would be people who want something that “just works”, and a lot of those people would rather see a few ads than deal with downloading a modified version of the official client. People who hate ads and are willing to tinker are more likely to run their own insurance, IMO.
They’d still have to use the Lemmy API, thus, recognizing ads and/or reversing code should be fairly easy (when you actually know how everything communicates).
Just as a side note (am kinda curious to be honest) I always ran the official Reddit app (don’t mod anything, so… didn’t see the point in using 3rd party apps) and I never EVER saw a single ad in the app. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in the US, IDK, but would like to hear an explanation as to why ads weren’t served on my client… not that it bothered me, lol 😂.
The goal of implementing this feature is to leverage the benefits of federation. If we wait until there is only a few big communities, the purpose of having federation becomes irrelevant. When an instance hosting one of those large communities shuts down, the community would have to migrate to the next major community.
By proactively implementing this feature, Lemmy can harness the advantages of federation while actively mitigating the challenges posed by community fragmentation and echo chambers. It provides a centralized hub that encourages cross-pollination of ideas, fosters community engagement, and ensures that valuable content is accessible to all users, regardless of the size or popularity of individual communities.
I disagree on two points:
- Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Echo chambers will always exist, but fragmentation is what keeps them contained to small pockets.
- A centralized hub would not necessarily foster community engagement. Seeing hundreds of comments on a post is often enough of a barrier.
see I’m not sure I see that as a problem. There are lots of reasons to spawn a new but similar community (bad community mods, bad server admins). There are lots of subreddits I avoided because they were just too big to get into any real info or discussion, just the same beginner questions asked over and over again.
The proposal does not necessarily imply merging all small communities with others. The implementation can provide an optional choice to community moderators, allowing them to decide whether they want their community to be included in the multireddit. This approach respects the autonomy of individual communities and acknowledges the reasons why new but similar communities may emerge, such as issues with community mods or server admins. By offering this flexibility, the feature can cater to the diverse needs and preferences of different communities while still providing the benefits of consolidating posts from communities with similar topics.
Who would control the multi-community, and how could a potential bad actor/community be dealt with?
I don’t think it’ll ever be perfect either. The setup Lemmy has just means it’ll be more resilient to breaking down entirely because there’s no single point of failure. So yeah hopefully it stabilizes more over time.
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From what I understand: Yes, because the users commenting could easily be from different instances
I agree. Time will show which instance most people will go to. The smaller instances will slowly quiet down, while the larger ones will gain in popularity. The issue will definitely sort itself out over time. I’m not worried at all.
Whatever y’all decide, please just remember what McLuhan said: “The medium is the message.” What’s the message implicit in your decision? Be deliberate.
should understand lemmy.world is just a backwater refugee camp. fediverse is much more https://fediverse.observer/map this map needs an update https://fediverse.party/
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
There is a list of federated and blocked instances on the bottom of the page. https://latte.isnot.coffee/instances
Also this script is to see which instances block or are blocked by the instance you choose.
Oh great thats really helpful. Thanks!
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
Make it user specific. Feeds are combined solely from the individual user’s perspective. Consumption would be easier but submissions are still federated.
I think this was the proposal - but problem is still doing this automatically.
It’s not posts I’m worried about, it’s comments. Comments are where the discussion takes place and the culture develops
Why not just allow the option to subscribe to them as a multi or subscribe to them individually, leave it up to the user to decide?
Because humans are barely sapient animals with limited understanding of ourselves and little to no awareness of the long-term consequences of our actions.
We don’t operate in our own best interest or the best interest of the group, we’re built on the assumption that the environment and our local community will moderate our actions. There’s natural limits to physical actions, natural repercussions to social ones when everyone knows each other
Technology doesn’t have these limits. Things made of code can scale past human comprehension in seconds. And it changes it’s users
Part of the ethics of software development is to carefully consider the ramifications of what you bring into the world.
The public can’t make an informed choice, because they lack both the nuanced understanding of the tech, and every choice has a cognitive load. It’s up to you to make it safe and healthy or to inform them of the consequences, and you can’t just put up a 26 research papers on the psychological and solciological considerations for hitting a button… No one is going to read that.
You also can’t have booby traps - anything a user can do inadvertently or accidentally shouldn’t have serious consequences.
There’s some room for debate, but it all comes down to this: you’re responsible for how an average user is going to use your technology. You should do all you can to make it easy to use the tech safely, you should add covers over the buttons that do something with consequences, and things with deeper ramifications should only be available to power users who presumably have the technical knowledge to make an informed choice themselves.
So onto this situation. Say you make this button “sub to /c/_____ and all sister communities”. That’s not really a choice - it’s like you go to McDonald’s and order a burger, and they say “for the same price, I’ll give you 3 additional burgers with different options”. Some people would say no, but they wanted a thing and you offer them more of the thing. If they haven’t tried them before, there’s fomo - what if one of the other burgers is better? And it’s not like they couldn’t just stop eating.
The majority will accept 4 burgers, because they don’t see the hidden consequences. There’s no world where the average person sits down with 4 burgers and eats less than they would if they had 1 - it’s human nature, studied and documented… Giving someone more food leads to them eating more, because we judge the amount we’re eating in large part visually. Put it on a larger plate or pile it higher, and we underestimate how much we’ve eaten. Put it on a small plate, and we eat less.
Sure, there’s people who understand this - those of us who’ve struggled with weight or food scarcity are either not going to accept the burgers, or we’ll set 3 aside for later. There’s people who might benefit from eating 4 burgers - someone who burns 10k calories a day needs that kind of intake (even though they’d be better off with more variety).
Good or bad, you’ve increased consumption based on how you’ve presented this choice. The outcome was a statistical certainty, but technically it was a choice. It’s just a choice that every human would naturally answer the same way if they went in blind - do you want only the thing you asked for, or that plus more free stuff.
So if you make this a button, it’ll overwhelm the single sub option. And there’s a game theory aspect to this - I’d likely hit the button too, because individual choices here don’t matter, it’s a matter of speed and volume of users subbing and unsubbing
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?
That’s how multi-reddit works, totally client-side, much better IMO than “forcing” the choice upon everyone at admin level.
Agree - Mastodon has lists, would like this too for Lemmy (even though I’ve not used them so far)
Why don’t you read the issue? It’s in lemmy-ui, so it’s clearly client-side. So just because you want to waste your time going through hundreds of instances to find similar communities, do we have to force everyone else to do the same?
Oh woah, dial it back, friend
Maybe don’t take disagreement so personally?
I too would like to do this myself and not have AI or anyone else decide for me what content gets lumped together.
I predict that this is also an issue that will slowly resolve itself over time, as critical masses of users gradually coalesce around one community, or more…but only if the extras are distinct in some way…which would very specifically be made more difficult by the sort of programming you’re proposing.
I’m not saying there’s no merit in your suggestion, only that it may not be the one-size-fits-all solution that you seem to think it is
Not taking it personally.
I would also appreciate the ability to customize, but it would be helpful to begin with a curated list of instances for each topic.
But who gets to curate that? How who has to sift through all of the 8000 instances and figures out the topic of each of likely thiusands of communities?
Automated sounds as though it’s purely based off of the community name? How does it figure out the difference between table top gaming or video gaming or even slots/gambling?
What about football? American or the rest of the world?
What about politics? Is it left wing or right wing?
Seems like a cool idea at first, but when you get into the weeds it becomes a pretty complicated issue.
OptimusPrime is a Deception here, apparently.
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I got a few ideas:
-
Let people make their own multi-communities, then publish them. The multis would get a separate category in search.
-
Let community moderators decide to join a list. For example:
- community@a and community@b exist.
- mod@a starts multi-community@a
- mod@b requests for community@b to join that multi
- mod@a accepts
- multi-community@a is now a shared feed of both communities.
This is what the old Star Trek subreddits seem to be trying to do over here. I believe r/StarTrek, r/DaystromInstitute, and r/Risa have combined into Star Trek here.
-
Why not for local communities, you still display / require the local @instance name after the community name.
So /c/foo on Lemmy.world even when I am on that instance is still displayed as
Whereas if I search for or subscribe to “foo” by itself it displays content from the “foo” communities from all federated instances?
Some way to search other instances without knowing their name like that would be great.
It would be really nice if the search showed all results from federated communities instead of just the ones members are already subbed to
reddit also had that a bunch of places, for example /r/gaming /r/games /r/truegaming etc. etc.
I feel as others had suggested that client side multi
redditscommunities would be ideal so you could set up what groups you like to peruse yourself.I prefer sublemmys and multilemmys
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 read on another post in a different community that some servers have neo-nazis running them? If that is the case, no thanks, I don’t want that.
It’s possible, it’s one of the downsides of being federated. The instances are moderated independendently, there is no central authority that enforces law or morals. It’s great to avoid things like what happened to Reddit, but stuff like that can and will show up. You can always block instances to avoid seeing them, if you want.
How does one block an instance as a user? I thought only instances can block other instances.
Seconding this, I keep coming across Portuguese things and I don’t speak Portuguese.
Maybe this is your sign to learn Portuguese…
Mas não conheço ninguém que fale português para conversar. Se eu quisesse aprender um idioma, deveria escolher um local para realmente usá-lo.
Holy shit that was fast. I didn’t know Lemmy had a language extension feature.
My bad, I meant community. You can block communities individually. For blocking instances as a user there’s an open issue on Lemmy’s GitHub, but I believe it’s not going to be implemented anytime soon.
That’s easy to block those individual instances if needed (assuming they exist).
How do you block an instance as a user? I know how to block a community from an instance, and i know an instance owner can defederate another instance, but how do I as a user block a whole instance?
Actual neo-nazis or people you disagree with?
They don’t care what you want…
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’m new too, but here’s what I’ve learned in the last week:
You’re a user of and logged into @beehaw.org. This post (and the community it was posted to) exists on the @lemmy.world instance. You can see and post to it from your beehaw.org instance, because @lemmy.world also exists in the Fediverse.
My instance is @lemmy.world, so this community/post is “local” to my instance, but in practice that’s not super important. All that tells you is where I enter the fediverse, from there we’re able to see and post in communities from across instances. For example, I can see communities/posts from @beehaw.org, where you are. I am subbed to a few communities there.
It’s possible that a community like /c/games exists on @beehaw.org and on @lemmy.world. You would see them as [email protected] and [email protected], and they are separate communities (despite having the same community name) so you can sub to one or both. OP is basically suggesting a feature to group (for example) [email protected] and [email protected] so that it just looks like one big community.
More experienced Lemmy and Fediversers, please correct any errors I may have made it this post!
My instance is @lemmy.world, so this community/post is “local” to my instance, but in practice that’s not super important.
I think that’s generally true, however it’s worth noting that what you can see from other (non-local) instances is dependent on the admin of your instance. They choose with other instances to federate (exchange data, e.g. communities, posts, comments, etc) with. If they choose not to federate with a specific instance, you won’t see content from that instance.
There are already examples of this, but I don’t know the details well enough to be confident in expanding on it.
Excellent point!
And as if to illustrate my point, Beehaw is no longer federated with Lemmy.world, so @[email protected] won’t be getting updates to this thread any more.
Yeah I just read that news and thought of this comment trail! My description did not age well.
Hopefully this is just due to sudden and rapid uptake of users to the fediverse and not something that happens regular once things have settled down a little.
Yeah, it’s not immediately obvious what the implications of an account on a particular instance are. I think over time it should become more obvious, for example meta data about instances on lemmy instance directory sites, so users know what they’re signing up for. I also think things will settle down as communities find an instance that works for them, and tools improve for more granular control over federation.
What do you need to know? (As I was typing this g0nz0li0 posted a reply, I’ll try to mention different things)
At a low level it’s not too bad, if you’ve gotten this far I think you’ve gotten through the worst of it. Things get a bit messy when you follow a link or leave your instance though. (Link replacement seems to be the #1 complaint and is extremely easy to fix though. I’d expect it to come quickly)
But for the most part just browsing the various front page at Beehaw should do you. If you’re interested in communities going to https://beehaw.org/search and changing it to all will help you find them. Just be wary because they open links that aren’t made for Beehaw lol. But you can hit subscribe there and then see them under communities > Subscribed and your front page will populate with them if you goto beehaw’s front page (Beehaw.org) and click subscribed instead of local or all. (Which local is communities that were made ON beehaw but anyone can see those if they search for them, and All is posts from every server on the fediverse. So they could be from anything (NSFW seems to be going crazy right now so that’s most of my all feed)) There’s also a bug right now that new posts get added to the top so the front page experience is a bit frustrating right now.
I like your username and profile pic. Were you an r/unclebens enthusiast by chance?
Hopefully those guides get moved over to Lemmy. I’m in Colorado where we just legalized psychedelics so I’ve been curious about trying to grow.
