Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it’s still in !politics@lemmy.world )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
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Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.
Indeed, I use it from time to time, but from my experience, it seems like LW users tend to stay on their local feed, increasing the visibility of their local communities compared to ones from other instance
Is Lemmy World’s default when signed in local? Or is this a consequence of many more active communities being there?
Not sure, might be, I’m too lazy to setup another LW account to find out ha ha.
Might also just be that it’s their way of avoiding political content from lemmygrad, hexbear and lemmy.ml
Can’t help those who won’t help themselves 🤷♂️
Indeed, but the issue is when one third of the population is there
lemmy.world has middling to bad moderation.
lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.
lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.
taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.
I keep hearing about bad moderation, so I guess it’s indeed an issue.
It is really a compromise, there is no ideal situation. Should we initiate something and ask people to leave LW due to bad moderation? That would probably be seen as unnecessary drama.
i don’t think compounding problems imply a single compound solution.
instead, tackle each problem directly.
- encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
- encourage installment of more mods to combat ineffectual moderation
- call for transparency in moderator selection to combat cronyism
I see
encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
My gut feeling is that most of the people on LW are comfortable there, and wouldn’t see the point in decentralization. That happened in the past with the removal of privacy communities, or the fact that LW is still federated with Threads, still they have 18k MAU
and that’s absolutely fair. i think another group though are uncomfortable and are simply unaware that they can move.
for example, i saw a conversation where some folks were expressing uncomfortability that .world is federated with .ml. someone else brought up switching to an instance that was defederated with .ml (happened to be mine, shoutout .cafe) and they were all like “yo! dope let me do that”
so it’s almost a matter of education/spreading awareness for some at least
Definitely. I feel like every other week I stumble upon someone who doesn’t know they can switch instances in literally 3 clicks.
I guess I’m your person this week. I thought you had to create a new account to switch instances. The only time I’ve moved so far was from kbin.social to lemm.ee so I definitely had to but it’s nice to know that if I want to move again I can keep the same account.
To be completely correct you will have to create a new account, but you can export and import your subscriptions and block lists from the new account to the new one in a few clicks
It’s a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It’s the same thing with mastodon.social.
I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn’t know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.
Indeed.
Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
That’s probably good for Mastodon, but for Lemmy there isn’t so much choice. My rule of thumb, in order is
- lemm.ee
- sh.itjust.works if you are ok with the name
- discuss.tchncs.de or lemmy.ca depending if you are located in Europe or North America
- lemmy.zip as they are good contenders, but a bit smaller than the others
Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?
Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?
Now you understand 😄
They have a strange issue with their frontend, the instance is still running, and can be accessed using other front ends, but as you can see, not the best experience for a new joiner
Shamelessly plugging lemm.ee- it is exactly what you’re looking for when you say general purpose instance
New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
It’s a little less the case with Lemmy and other less popular fediverse stuff, but isn’t a large number of vague/general purpose instances a contributor to this? In other words, wouldn’t more focused instances help reduce this problem?
A big benefit of federation shines with topic-focused instances in that it ensures an already curated local feed to your main interest (or interests), meanwhile remaining able to connect with and discuss more general interest stuff via home and federated feeds.
Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it’s immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it’s not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an “official” Lemmy app doesn’t even have “Lemmy” in the name, and doesn’t pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.
Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.
Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can’t be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that’s why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)
The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances.
Or there aren’t enough specific ones. If you go to Join Lemmy and you are presented with a number of general purpose instances, you are likely to pick the largest and only later realise the problems that entails and switch to another instance.
If you are a Trekkie or read books or game or program then it is easy to pick one. Ditto if there is an instance specific to your country (I should know).
If you look at Mastodon (which is more developed and has a wider and deeper selection of instances) you can see that these niches instances do well and I think we need to encourage more here.
Can confirm that when choosing a Mastodon account, .social wasn’t taking new users at the time. So I looked at the list and chose vmst.io because “Oh, I’m a nerd too.”
I’ll say that while the number of connections is far lower, so far I haven’t noticed that as a problem in the limited capacity that I use Mastodon.
Thanks!
@otter@lemmy.ca, I wanted to ask you about something: I posted to !til@lemmy.ca in the past, but it seems that now the community isn’t actively moderated, and on the other side !todayilearned@lemmy.world is getting a resurgence.
Do you think it is worth it trying to post to the lemmy.ca one, or should we go with the flow and post on the LW one to make it grow?
We were actually checking into this recently! While the mods look inactive from the post history, there is an active mod keeping an eye on the community.
I’m planning to make more posts to !til@lemmy.ca, and while I’m not sure which one will be best in the long run, I want to try and see if we can grow this one.
As for the other communities, I’m planning to go through and clean up moderation sometime in the next little while :)
Alright, good to know! I see if I can find stuff to post there, but usually I post to !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee as there is some overlap, and the community got some traction a few days ago
I am usually trying to encourage people to host communities on other instances (recently moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, but sometimes it feels like fighting against the current.
What do you think?
Communities on big instances have a chance to grow. So once it gets big enough on something like world, they could put up a movement post and switch the community onto a smaller server. I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving. There are enough subscribers that some posts get upvoted and end up like with 25 upvotes in a hurry so they appear on the tops lists. Obviously, the more the community hits the top lists, the more people will see it and maybe subscribe to it.
I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving.
I would have thought that a smaller community would be easier to move, as there would be less inertia and inconvenience. I’ve deliberately created some communities on smaller servers and cross-posted to more general communities on larger servers to help with visibilty.
I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.
If the same story is posted in multiple communities, I’m only posting the first one I come across. Sometimes that becomes the next big discussion and other times it’s lost and another community takes over.
I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.
So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.
Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.
In my mind, the fix is that all posts to the same link should just collect the discussion all in one place, regardless of which community spawned it.
There may be a ton of good reasons that isn’t happening, but until there’s some sort of fix, centralization ensures you find a discussion and can contribute meaningfully.
Hello,
Thank you for your comment.
I agree with the fact that a story of post should only exist once, as you said. I guess the remaining question is what to do where there are two communities for the same topic.
I have a good example that I just stumbled upon: !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz is the most active community about maps, has usually one post per day every day for the last few months. Once in a while, someone posts on !mapporn@lemmy.world, and they instantly get a lot more comments than the first community.
!games@sh.itjust.works is also quite active, despite not being on LW.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
I would prefer we didn’t give up on federation, but until the tools are in place to mechanically support it, I don’t see it as strictly beneficial.
A post a day in a community is a bot, more often than not, and trying to create discussion on bot posts often just falls on deaf ears.
I don’t see a reason to push for fragmentation at this time, but rather organically support active communities wherever they’re found.
I’d love for there to be a mechanical solution to fragmentation, so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.
A post a day in a community is a bot, more often than not, and trying to create discussion on bot posts often just falls on deaf ears.
In this case, I’m pretty sure it’s not, it’s a mix between @The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world, @garfaagel@sh.itjust.works, myself and a few others.
We had a nice discussion a few weeks ago about metal bands (https://dormi.zone/post/1721444)
organically support active communities wherever they’re found.
Makes sense
so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.
I guess at some points moderators of communities around a same topic will have to agree on where to host the community. The split between !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id still doesn’t make sense to me today.
Sorry I didn’t mean to imply your specific example was a bot, rather my experience when I find a community with high post rates and low engagements it tends to be a bot.
No worries, I get what you mean.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, !spain@soccer.xyz is vastly different from doing it in, say, !soccerdrugs@news.world, even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.
I know, but this question is asked in the specific context where posters are mostly alone on a community for several weeks / months, where the LW equivalent has much more potential.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars? The idea being that there’s still some benefit to different moderation styles and community cultures/vibes.
Maybe also encouraging community moderators to communicate with each other more to figure out how they want their communities to be, how they might want to differ to create more distinct identities?
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars? The idea being that there’s still some benefit to different moderation styles and community cultures/vibes.
Indeed, we kind of have that in the sidebar of !casualconversation@lemm.ee
Maybe also encouraging community moderators to communicate with each other more to figure out how they want their communities to be, how they might want to differ to create more distinct identities?
I guess. As said elsewhere, cases such as !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id still seem weird to me
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars?
I think this is an excellent idea, and I have tried to do this with subs like !spaceflight@sh.itjust.works. It would be great if this became standard practice, or a sort of reciprocal courtesy between communities.
Any ideas for how to encourage mod communication?
Any ideas for how to encourage mod communication?
I would just DM the other mods. Worked quite well for me
