I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
I think a simple solution to this problem would be to be able to integrate several subscribed communities into a single timeline, similar to Mastodon Lists.
I would call this feature ‘Mingling’ :)
I think just being able in my client to “aggregate” different communities/magazines (I’m writing this from kbin) would be great. Like multireddits. This way, everyone can decide for themselves what smaller communities they want to subscribe to. I think neither Lemmy’s clients nor kbin support this right now, unfortunately.
This is what I want. A way for users to create their own “lists” similar to multireddits, which come up on their feeds as part of a super-community, and then they can share that list with other users.
No hassle for the moderators. No change to the system outside of the feature’s own self-contained stuff.
So what should be easier now is finding those communities/magazines, maybe on a post of one of these communities with links to the other ones
I think you can subscribe to individual magazines on kbin, then just show your subscribed magazines. This means you still have to subscribe to multiple communities. Eventually, it should settle with better modded ones reaching critical mass after some time. Everything is in flux right now, what you’re looking for is better done when communities are stable.
Yes, that works of course. What I like to do is look at a specific topic when I want to. Let’s say, I’m in the mood to only check out literature/book related stuff. I’d like to open my “Multimagazine” (I saw someone call it a rack, which I think is a nice analogy) where I only see posts that belong to this topic.
The only thing that’s a bit painful now is finding narrow topics. Reddit had grown so big, you can almost guarantee to look for niche topics. On here, you’re better asking /m/random.
In a year or so, if fediverse can grow nicely, maybe we’ll be asking top level instance to recommend the best community, and rebuild your niche collection.
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What about allowing communities to federate with others?
Eg. The mods at [email protected] and [email protected] could decide their communities have the same audience and ideology. They choose to federate with each other so anyone that subscribes to either or both will get posts for both. Mods will then work together to moderate.
Then if 1 set of mods decide to change their policies or go in a different direction they can then de-federate and break the 2 communities apart again.
I think this would be the easiest way honestly. It seems the least extra work or changes. Mods don’t even need to work together, just with their own posts. If they’re too different on their own, they won’t federate anyways.
If people really want a supergroup, it would in this situation only take a new community that does nothing but federate existing ones. But it may not even be needed.
I was thinking the idea of hashtags at the community and/or post level could be an idea. That way it could aggregate the various communities on instances under one umbrella. E.g. https://lemmy.ml/#gaming could bring up every federated and indexed community tagged gaming. A community such as the pokemon one on lemmy.ml could have tags #pokemon and #gaming in order to appear both at the superset of gaming as well as connect with other pokemon related subs if there was pokemonGo or pokemonTCG.
It would likely require an update of lemmy system itself, I’d have to spend a lot of time with the code to get an idea of how to implement it.
This is how it’s done on mastodon
I was thinking it would also have the plus of better integrating with mastodon.
I’m a terrible coder and I also won’t have any chance to even start figuring out Lemmy until at least Tuesday night.
This would be lovely. Then once that functionality was working, we could create a Reddit-style front-page for new accounts that subscribed to a bunch of popular hashtags. That would really help to ease onboarding and make instances feel a bit less isolated.
I propose two ways to create super communities:
Proposal 1) Tag and tag health)
A) Community tags: Here each community is associated with a set of tags (for example, the community ‘Earth’ can have tags #geology #geography #climate_change). When users post original content to these communities, they will be automatically suggested to add these default tags, but they can remove some tags or add other tags.
B) Tag health: A user Alice who consumes the content can view these posts, upvote some posts, downvote some posts, and can also report an inappropriate tag. Based on these reports, a numeric value can be ascribed to the health of each tag in that community. If the tag #climate_change is reported in a post, then that tag health would reduce.
For example, the community ‘Earth’ can have tags #geology (90% health), #geography (80% health), #climate_change (40% health).
C) Super-Community: A user Bob can create super communities based on community tags and tag health.
He can create a super-community ‘#geology’ which would lookup ‘Earth’ and pull the appropriately tagged posts from there. These tags are considered healthy, but Bob can set his own health threshold (say he sets it at 70% health).
He can also create a super-community ‘#climate_change’. This will not lookup posts from ‘Earth’, not even the appropriately tagged posts, because a lot of these posts were reported to be bad.
D) Tag Algebra: A user Charlie can create a super-community with multiple tags. For example, he can create (#novels OR #light_novels) EXCEPT (#tragedy AND #drama).
E) User Interface: When user David tries to create a super-community, he would simply enter the relevant tag(s). An advanced customization option would be hidden by default, but the user can expand it if he wishes. Upon expanding, he can see the default health threshold, and can modify it if he wishes. He can also see a list of all communities with that tag, along with their tag health, and a toggle button which automatically turns on or off based on the health threshold. The user can also manually override the automation, and specifically set one community to be on or off.
F) Conclusion: Unlike a central repository of super-communities, this approach can dynamically add new good communities. This approach can also remove old communities which have been abandoned by their moderators, when their tag health has deteriorated.
Proposal 2) Machine Learning Classification)
This is an extension of the first proposal of tag and tag health. Here we consider the following problem:
A) Problem) Suppose a community considers itself to be a neutral #news community. However, they have an unknown bias (capitalist, socialist, communist, etc). This bias is not reflected in the community tag or the post tag. However, users of one bias group would be dissatisfied to see posts of a different bias group.
Users outside the community cannot set unofficial tags or unofficial descriptions for the community since that can be abused. Then how would users create super-communities in a satisfactory manner?
B) Solution) Tag subgroup) Communities that share the same tag (say #news) would dedicate some of their server computing power for appropriately grouping themselves.
Suppose there are communities News1, News2, News3. Each community (say News1) would observe whether its own users upvote/downvote content from other communities (News2 and News3). Based on this, it would establish a positive link strength or a negative link strength with other communities.
In addition, moderators can also add a section called suggested similar communities, and dissimilar communities.
Based on these link strengths, all communities with the same tag (or tag algebra) can be grouped into multiple groups. When a super-community is created with this tag (or tag algebra), then the communities are grouped together if they have positive link strength with each other. However, if some child community has high negative link strength with other communities, then they would be classified into two or more groups, such that each group has positively linked child communities.
C) User interface) When user Emily tries to create super-community #news, it will get automatically created if the child communities do not have too much negative link strength with each other. However, if some news communities have a different theme from other news communities (negative link strength), then they would be auto-grouped into two or more groups.
Emily would see an advanced setting which is auto-expanded, and it will show two or more different groups. Each group would have a snippet that shows a couple of highly upvoted posts. Based on these snippets, Emily can choose any one group, or she can also choose any/all combination of these groups.
D) Conclusion) We can avoid the problem of duplicate communities with conflicting themes on multiple server instances.
That’s programmer logic. What we need is that mods of example.com/c/community and instance.xyz/c/realcommunity can agree on connecting, and from then on, everything from either would show up on the other as well.
No need to make things too complex.
Even after they connect, a user needs to subscribe to topics of their interest. It would be burdensome for a user to subscribe to the same topic multiple times on multiple servers, because everything is fragmented.
Maybe something closer to migration management in mastodon? Two groups of moderators on separate servers agree to a common set of moderation guidelines, publish an event or setting which says “these communities are merging”, and from that point on they act like aliases for a merged community which share responsibility across servers.
These “merged” communities could be visually flagged as distinct from the normal rules / moderation of their respective servers to prevent conflicts arising from differences in server management.
Feature support would be limited by the server events are sourced from. E.g. if beehaw.org and lemmy.ml merged their technology communities, people on beehaw still wouldn’t be able to downvote posts or see downvotes, but lemmy.ml would unless they explicitly disable to feature as a part of the merge contract.
When subscribing, you might see a list of merged communities which share responsibility for moderating the final one, and you have the ability to choose which “entrypoint” you use.
This is impressive despite my lack of understanding.
I think tags are a good idea, it doesn’t have to be too complicated (like proposal 1A only) but there should be a limit of around 5 tags a post and 5 tags a community.
I think that it fair.
I agree with some of the other replies that what you’re suggesting is pretty complex, but God, I love places that allow tag algebra. When it’s implemented well, it’s pretty user friendly because even non programmers have an intuitive sense of And/Or, and it makes finding new content much easier.
Have my upvote. Without such an ability, I fear fragmentation of communities will be a fatal flaw holding back Lemmy’s success
Isn’t that the whole point of Lemmy? So there’s no community that’s too big to fail?
Ideally you’d want 3-4, but 300.
not the whole point, imo
There is no problem if there are more communities with the same topic. The ones wich are better moderated and actively updated will eventually gain in popularity and stand out
Yup, essentially the same thing happens on Reddit and things always seem to work out in the end.
Could potentially be hundreds though, and puts a lot of work on users to look around for the best one -> most likely the communities in bigger instances will win out.
This is a discoverability problem that can be solved separately from the duplication “problem” though. Reddit has all the same duplication, there’s /r/tech and /r/technology, there’s /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, there’s suddenly 3 million aita communities. What makes people not sweat this at Reddit is that subreddit search is MUCH MUCH better than Lemmy’s community search. You always find the biggest subreddit first, and there’s no danger of finding only the small/irrelevant community because the big/main one didn’t show up in your search for confusing federation reasons.
If community search was effortless and worked to discover the biggest relevant community irrespective of the server it’s on, I think people would immediately stop caring about community duplication, similar to how it’s rarely cited as a problem on Reddit even though it’s rampant there as well.
You’ve articulated this much better than I could. I actually mentioned /r/AITI in one of my other comments actually, because it’s a great way to highlight how confusing community names can be.
I too am confused by the sudden proliferation of AITA subs, and I can only assume it’s due to some moderation decision. If a sub like AITAH grew to become larger than AITA, then that suggests maybe the community ™ were pretty united against whatever decision led to AITAH, and that we could then guess at some of this history by the sub names, because AITAH is clearly descended from AITA.
“memes” is another example. I’ve seen a few subs decide to separate out meme content because it can take over a sub, and usually their sister sub is in the sidebar, but on Lemmy, this may not be as clear.
Let’s say that we have nichehobby.lemmy.ml and nichehobby.lemmy.world, and because it’s such a niche hobby, they cannot compete with each other, so instead end up becoming specialised. Maybe niche hobby.lemmy.world becomes full of more meme content, while the other community is the “main” one. That’s a good dynamic to end up with, but it’s harder for a user to understand than on Reddit
Because on Reddit, I might see a crosspost or popular post from /r/nichehobbymemes and then wonder “huh, does that mean there’s a /r/nichehobby ?” And usually there is. It helps with discoverability
If you open browse.feddit.de you’ll see that it’s not difficult to find the biggest/most popular one
I expect we’ll see a lot of this with he Reddit drama going on, eventually it’ll stabilize.
Maybe. But until then I need a possibility to aggregate several into one…
While I am on board with the idea, I don’t think it should be a programmatic solution at the community level. Rather, either the third party app or the server (let’s say Beehaw for an example) should allow for the option to create collections based on community identifiers. It would be more of a display function.
The reason I think this needs to be done at the user level is because everyone has their own organization models. At one point, I had all my subreddits aggregated by Library of Congress Categories (since may home library is organized that way). Some people may want to put c/Beatles in a Music category, while others may want Bands or even others by genre.
What would be nice is if the communities had tags to identify their subject matter. For instance, c/Beatles could be #britishinvasion #music #beatles #band #60srock etc. That way people could look by tag and aggregate that way (plus it would make it easier to find c/GeorgeHarrison c/PaulMcCartney c/JohnLennon c/RingoStarr ;-) )
The way I would see this play out is that the user would have to option to create a “Super Community” and give it a name. Then there would be a search by name, tag, subject etc. and the results would have a toggle that would add, or subscribe and add, that community to the super community.
A solution like this would preserve the sovereignty and integrity of each of the servers. All the servers are offering are possible some more discrete identifiers (should they choose) to make themselves more findable. The control is placed on the user to organize and curate their selections.
I don’t mind responding to different communities with similar subjects. I did it all the time on Reddit. But it would be nice to, say, focus on my “Apple” super community or my “Worldbuilding” super community. When you have eclectic interests that span a vast array of topics, being able to aggregate “like topics” is a boon.
I agree with this post 100%. Super Communities need to be able to be shared too - I’m sure there are some folk who will just want a quick start and would love to just subscribe to a premade “top 10 /c/technology communities” or something. And then it could be expanded later etc.
Honestly the multi Reddit model works really well. When I see a multi that I like, I can clone it and change it how I need. It basically acts like a fork.
Yes, this. It allows decentralization to still exist protecting users from future reddit overlords, while still allowing each user to customize their experience by aggregating what matters to them personally. It also makes it super easy to remove one specific instance of a Beatles “sub” when it gets too raunchy, racy or just not what you personally want to see anymore.
It needs to work both ways to have real utility for advanced user topics. Having a distributed community limits the chances of accessing useful specialization for fringe topics. This is the main reason I started using reddit.
Like I start asking questions on reddit about optimising the Linux CPU scheduler and most people haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about. Within 12 hours I get a post with someone’s 59 page thesis covering the exact subject in more detail than I would ever find on my own. The more divided the group is, the less likely one is to encounter specialization, and therefore the less utility of the platform. Bridging users can’t fill the information gap.
That’s exactly what I thought of. Here’s my proposal (though I don’t know if this can be implemented in the technology or if it would be compatible with ActivityPub):
Suppose we have two similar communities (i.e., north.pole and north.star, but they both tackle northness but in different instances). The mod from either communities would send an invite to the other to form a “group” or “federate” or “ally”. Now, if the other mod approves, here’s what happens:
Whenever you post something in a community that has a group, it would be synced with the communities in other instances that are allied to it, including upvotes, comments, and other metrics. So if I post in north.pole, people in north.star could see my post too because we’re in an “alliance” and vice versa. They can also upvote my post and I can upvote theirs. There would just be a sign (probably a flair-like design) that would tell users in other instances from which instance the post came from.
With regards to moderation, here’s how: they are basically separate communities with content syncing between them. Suppose a user in north.star posts something offensive and against north.pole community rules. The mods in north.pole can block that post from appearing in the north.pole feed.
And here’s an unrelated gripe: there should be an instance-standard “ouster poll” for communities that are dead. With what I see right now in the influx of Lemmy users, many communities are dead and users are willing to revive them but they can’t because the moderators of those communities are already inactive and redundancy is a pain in “advertising” membership in Lemmy already. There should be like a poll of interested users where they would agree to “oust” the inactive mod (of course there’s also a qualification for “inactive”) and replace them with probably a democratically “elected” moderator.
I don’t like the idea of a voting system for mods, as it can be gamed very easily by bot accounts. Democracy is sadly under threat due to AI, and so I think the wall-gardened approach might be necessary: users choose an instance of north that suits them, and if the mod is a dick, then those users let the mods of the other north instances (under that super community) know, and the mods of other instances make the decision.
Great ideas, sounds ideal to me
True fragmentation seems like it would be a huge issue.
Also allowing easy exporting/migrating between instances should be possible.
From my understanding (having literally discovered lemmy and the fediverse like an hour ago) mastodon supports things like grouping and account migration, so I assume it should be possible with lemmy?
Also I’ll be honest I have no idea what mastodon is.
Also I’ll be honest I have no idea what mastodon is.
Mastodon is to Twitter what Lemmy is to Reddit: a decentralized alternative built on the ActivityPub protocol for the fediverse.
Someone’s already replied about Mastodon’s relation to Twitter, but I think the big part of why we can learn from Mastodon is because they’ve gone through all this in November ish.
They had the server difficulties, regular people getting confused at how federation works, struggling with the conflict of wanting to leave Twitter but Mastodon being relatively small compared to Twitter, people making accounts but then petering off in terms of usage (like me! Except I didn’t use Twitter much anyway).
Whilst the lessons from Mastodon won’t always be applicable to Lemmy, there’s a lot that can be learnt
You’re already posting in a super community!
Aww shucks bloodfart ☺️
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere but it could just be a UI thing handled by/for each user, that way moderation and control will stay where they are
Basically I could make a group of communities/magazines, for example
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]For browsing, up/downvoting, and commenting it could be totally transparent. When you want to make your own thread it could just have you select the specific magazine/community from a drop down.
This wouldn’t fix the problem of seeing multiple duplicate posts from each.
I think this is the ideal solution, but you should be able to share the groups you create with others, exactly like multireddits. That way, collections of these groups could be made available to others, for them to add to their feed.
Kind of like multireddits? I hope so
We definitely need multireddits here! And cross-posts. Helps immensely in aggregating and discovering communities!
Even within Reddit communities, a lot of posts ended up in multiple places, and the ‘crossposting’ function seemed off to me, because everyone voted on and commented in different places.
I wonder if a ‘tag’ system wouldn’t work better, where a post shows up under multiple hashtags. This way, a picture could go under ‘#sea #thalassophobia #submarines #pictures’ all at once.
If everyone votes on the same post, posts would receive negative attention for inappropriate tags (I’m assuming that people would downvotes pictures of cats which had the #dogs hashtag).
I’m assuming that people would downvotes pictures of cats which had the #dogs hashtag
Honestly I’m not sure. One problem on reddit is that people just upvote things they like that show up on their frontpage regardless of where it’s posted, which means all the big subs blur together.
I had the same thought here: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/9828/uhhh-what-do-I-call-the-subreddits#entry-comment-42869
B sounds like a sensible solution to the issue, but maybe not so much in a thing that communities “join”, but rather “connect” to. The former sounds like a centralized thing that has to be hosted somewhere, the latter being something that exists purely through the communities that are part of it. However, I suspect this needs to be a feature within the actual fediverse type protocol that all those instances (including Mastodon) use, to make this an actual possibility.
Maybe using tags? A community can tag itself in areas it wants to both be included in and excluded from. And allow users to surf tag feeds to comment and upvote on, also allow us to organise our communities within groups in our own way?
I had the same idea. Tags are already there to gather posts related to a topic in a single page. The difference in experience would be the curation reddit’s subreddit system allows. Curation and moderation. Otherwise, an agreed upon tagging scheme should do the trick if the only concern is subscribing to topics.
