Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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I hope there will be millions of similar instances one day, because this is part of being federated. This is a distributed network. I can join any community if I want, I can configure my own server if I want, and so can you and everyone else. If your community then scales faster than mine because your content is more relevant or better by any means, that’s fine with me. I can either stay small or learn from you and grow later, and so can all others, just as they themselves want it to be.
At least this is my opinion, this is why I am here.
Long comment ahead, sorry about that.
This is the exact worry I’ve had about lemmy’s federation for a long long time, so I’ve even made an issue on the github awhile ago, with a possible solution. Take a look.
But I don’t think it’s been high up on the dev’s priority list, either due to lack of time and a backlog or they just don’t see it as a desired feature, because they might like the idea of a hundred separate similar communities. They might see the future of lemmy’s federation in the form of old school forums but with one account login, instead of as a single large community a la reddit. I think that’s a mistake. There’s a reason reddit replaced forums, and it’s not just a single login, it’s also single communities.
I almost think mastodon might solve this sooner than lemmy. All they need to do is take the existing feature of “trending posts”, and just apply it to individual hashtags too, which can btw already be followed, since the latest update. Boom, they basically already have interconnected “subreddits” at that point. They would just need to add top of the day/week/month, and they’ve mirrored all the features.
And to be honest, I see merit in both approaches. There is a certain level of humanity, personability and coziness in old school forums that isn’t often or easily replicated in large communities generated by the modern social media format. But the other format also has its merits.
Imagine there’s an instance dedicated to engineering. It would obviously have the best askelectronics community. And lets say you’re a person that’s into plants and has an account on an instance dedicated to gardening. And now you want to ask a question to askelectronics. You’d first have to know about the existence, the name and/or the url of the engineers’ instance and then go there to get a good answer. That seems like a hassle and unlikely to happen. Mastodon has hundreds of instances.
What would instead happen, is that people would gravitate to a couple, two or three, large instances, that would become huge, most likely split on political grounds. And that’s, to be honest, kinda what’s already happening with lemmy, no? Maybe two or three additional instances, for, continents or something special, like an instance for official communities of projects. I feel like this future would lead to max 10 large politically echo-chambered instances.
If instead we really would get random topic based instances, things would be very different from reddit. You’d always start your posts with: “So… guys… what’s the best instance to ask this question on?”
And if this feature I suggested existed, with the opt in/opt out choice for communities, you could have the best of both worlds, with ease of use included. Actual technical, bandwidth, funding, scaling issues not withstanding, I haven’t considered that yet.
Maybe I’m wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m curious what other people think.
It’s a never ending problem/not problem. It used to occur with forums, with Stack exchange network, with facebook groups, with reddit (probably mitigated somehow), and now with Lemmy. You must live with it.
If the “electronics” instance is already federating with with the “plants” instance (which is likely if it is a famous and active community) then the “askelectronics” community will show up on a community search on the “plants” instance as well and thus will be easy to find.
True, but so would all the other askelectronics communities on all the other random instances too. Good luck finding the best instance and the best community on your own. Maybe, depends.
Also, I might’ve ninja edit my comment just as you were posting, somewhat relevant to this, so I’ll repeat it here: I think this would lead to people just simply asking about the best community all the time. In this case, this stuff might just have to end up being stickied somewhere, in literally all the communities: “If you want a better answer, go to: yaddayadda”.
Its good manners to lurk a bit in a community first to see if it is actually the right one to ask the questions, so I don’t really see this as an issue (i.e. you need to put in at least minimal effort for people to put in effort in return to answer your questions). Normally the subscriber number and overall activity will give you a pretty good idea about the community quite quickly.
That’s fair. Assuming people do behave that way, it wouldn’t be an issue.
On a slightly tangential angle: what about the communities that maybe won’t have a dedicated instance, like: corgi, cooking, jokes, etc… all those communities and posts would be on the biggest instance(s). If the devs don’t want this instance to be the flagship instance, once/if lemmy hits sudden growth they’ll be in for a rough time. :P
I just feel like this approach isn’t super conductive to decentralization. In the alternative scenario you’d be seeing corgi pics all over the network, this way most likely just here. But maybe that’s just an issue of lemmy’s current small size, and would be solved on its own once it grew, and the number of instances grew. Maybe I’m underestimating the growth potential of smaller instances.
Wait do people in this thread even understand federation?
I don’t. Please explain it?
IMO There are enough english-generalist instances There could probably be some more country specific/language specific ones.
I posted on mastodon that anyone thinking about making a mastodon server for a niche community should instead look at lemmy e.g. drumming, etsy, music etc. It’s screamingly obvious to me that it would be a better approach to host a community, but requires more advocates promoting things over there.
Sidenote instance admins need to manage their instances and look to curate communities that give it an identity of its own.
I see what you mean. For instance, if you search for “main” you will find dozens of indistinguishable communities for each instance. That’s understandable but one may wonder to what extent it could reach in the future, but I think ultimately @poVoq@slrpnk.net’s right.
Why would each of those 100 instances have a “asklemmy” community? If people create a new “asklemmy” community on a different instance, it is clearly because they do not want their posts to be part of the “asklemmy” community on lemmy.ml as otherwise they could just post there?
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Why would they be discouraged? If the community on another instance serves a purpose then why would it be discouraged to have it?
For example I created a “technology” community on slrpnk.net because I felt it would be nice to have a place more focussed on sustainable technologies instead of the “technology” community on lemmy.ml that seems to be mostly about the latest tech hype and some other random stuff people come across while surfing the net.
Can you dumb down a little more please
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It is explained in the sidebar of that community and cross-posting is a thing in Lemmy, so in the rare cases that a post makes sense in both communities, they are linked more or less automatically.
I am not sure what your alternative suggestion is. That communities get replicated across instances? What would be the point of a decentralized/federated network then if everything is replicated into a centralized structure like that?
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Probably it wouldn’t be too hard to piece together an aggregate view of several (likeminded) communities. But obviously you couldn’t post into this view directly.