I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.
The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.
Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.
Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.
Federate communities are literally the point of lemmy. They were there from the beginning?
You are correctly understanding the downside of federation, i.e., instead of just having one “world news” community, you could have multiple. If you subscribe to them all, you could see duplicated posts across them all, or you might miss things if you only subscribe to one, etc… These are the downsides.
There are upsides to this model too. Let me illustrate with a story in recent history. The mods of 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone were unhappy with some of their admin’s decisions. If this were reddit, they would be shit out of luck, because the admins are the same across all of reddit. Not so in the threadiverse! So the mods decided to hop instances to lemmy.world.
To make a long story short, now there are at least three “196” communities, with two of them thriving: the original 196, which moved back to lemmy.blahaj.zone by popular demand, the onehundredninetysix community, which sprung up by popular demand when the mods of the original comm left blahaj, and 196@lemmy.world, which was the new home of the 196 mods for a short while, and persisted amongst those who wanted to stay on lemmy.world.
I feel like I’m describing the migration of the elves in the Simarilion.
And this is not to mention how Piefed and Mbin, etc, can also have communities that split the audience.
So tl;dr, yes this splits the audience, but in the end gives communities the freedom to choose which mods and admins they want, instead of getting stuck with unpopular mods or admins.
I’ve never heard of federated communities.
Keep in mind the fediverse is not lemmy. Lemmy is the software that allows you to read, post, and comment, but there are others like piefed.
The basic problem you’ve described is a potential problem, but in practice it’s not really significant.
I’ve never really cared much for the idea of “community” online and certainly on reddit. Like what is a community really other than a category of similar posts ? The idea that it’s the people that make the community and that you need one cohesive place or platform for that community to exist just isn’t accurate.
For example, every instance might have it’s own “selfhosted” community. If you search you’ll see a half dozen. Just subscribe to the few busiest like everyone else, and you’ll see all the posts. I guess what I’m saying is that “the community” informally exists across all instances.
The best thing about federation is that you can choose not to follow specific communities if you don’t want to support their content. Like maybe you’re into manga memes but you don’t want to support the lack of moderation on some instances.
I don’t know exactly how it works but piefed has a feature where if a post is a link to a news article then it will list the comment sections for all cross posts under one post. Something like that anyway, I’m not sure exactly how it works, but often when looking at a post for an article you’ll see comments from other posts of the same article.
if a post is a link to a news article then it will list the comment sections for all cross posts under one post.
This is such an underrated feature of PieFed, and it solves OP’s problem entirely.
I’m surprised I’m getting replies to the very first post I ever made because I edited it recently. On reddit you don’t get new activity from editing. Where are you even seeing this?
What? Edited posts dont disappear.
Do they surface to the top though?
No idea mate.
The fun thing is that since Lemmy, piefed, etc are open source, theoretically anyone could learn how the algorithms work…if they had the programming skills to understand the code.
I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of decentralization. We don’t decentralize in order to keep communities small. We decentralize so that normal people, the non-billionaires, can host Lemmy.
Let me explain. It starts with a simple premise: social media owned by companies can and will enshittify. If not right now, then they will in the future.
From this premise, we conclude that the only way to produce a healthy, self-sustaining social media is by having the people own it rather than a company. But this leads to a challenge: only companies and billionaires have the money to be able to host large social media sites. A large site requires a large server, and that requires a lot of money.
The Fediverse sidesteps this issue by only requiring people to have small servers, to keep costs low. But then that introduces a new problem, which is that small servers can’t host the sheer number of people required to promote discussions and communities. So, the Fediverse makes a second innovation: have the small servers communicate with each other and share information, so that as a collective, the sum of the small servers becomes large enough to host a healthy community of users.
We federate across multiple sites because if we were to all pile into a single site, it would overload that site, and the poor chap who’s running the server would have a terrible day trying to keep the site running.
The issue you’re noticing (having multiple communities of the same topic) isn’t really the intention of federation. That issue is just because a bunch of people from Reddit tried to make the same communities all at the same time without checking if the community already exists. The expectation is that, over time, communities with the same topic will consolidate, exactly as you predicted.
