Alright, I’ve had some time to think about it, and we’re gonna be staying open to comments. Sorry if this post upset you earlier, it wasn’t my intention to be dramatic (though I understand that I most likely was). I’m not great at these things… yet. I hope Lemmy’s cross-instance communication options improve and we can get a better way to comment on posts between different communities later down the line. For now, we have to put in work to make this community and fediverse grow, so we can have a place to share knowledge and emotions that no corporation will run into the ground for profit.
Contents of this post before the decision was made, for reference:
spoiler
This community was created when I just started browsing on Lemmy, so I really had no clue about what is the best way to handle a community here. Considering the nature of fediverse, it’s not a question that’s easy to answer. And I still don’t have a perfect answer, but I think I might be closer to it.
What I want to do is to lock all posts from future comments on sh.itjust.works. I have a couple of good reasons to do this and a couple of reasons to reconsider. I’ll go over them in a list and try to keep some perspective on them.
Reasons to lock
I want to direct discussion to music instances for everyone’s convenience. A single place for music discussion, so you don’t have to switch over multiple posts and check if somebody is talking about the same thing. I understand that the idea of the fediverse is to decentralize, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately, the functionality of Lemmy right now doesn’t play well with that idea and provides a horrible user experience in return for following it. Compromises have to be made.
Also, having most music-production discussion, communities and posts in one instance will make it easier to find related content. Browsing communities on waveform is way easier than trying to guess all possible names that a music community might have. For example, if you search for “Music Production” on lemmy community browser, you might not find “Ableton” or “FL Studio” communities that are directly related to it and there are many more community names that are not easily guessable (like there used to be on r***it, with places like r/trees or r/worldpolitics, nsfw warning). I hope you get my point there.
Finally, I feel like a lot of users have anxiety over posting at a correct place (same as me, same as it was on r***it), so restricting comments to one instance will help us reduce anxiety and help first-time commenters and posters make the initial push. (Maybe rewriting the sidebar to be a bit less imposing will help that too)
Reasons to not lock
I understand that some people found this community on sh.itjust.works and appreciate the convenience of being able to do everything here. I don’t want to take away from that if I don’t have to. Good news is, these problems are known by the devs and better synchronization between instances and cross-posts will come, so the measure is going to be temporary while Lemmy is busy getting better developer support from FOSS community.
In addition, there is an argument to be made about archiving of knowledge and redundancy. If we lock comments to just one instance, if that instance goes down (temporarily or forever), all of the history made on that instance could be gone too.
As far as I know, other servers definitely keep records of servers they federated with, but searching for copies of posts might get more difficult in case of one instance going down as not every server is going to have every community discovered to archive it (and I do not know if there are any other limitations to that feature). Again, that’s something I can only partially address as a community moderator, as the issue lies in the platform. It’s inevitable that we’re going to lose some history if the worst is to happen. Sh.itjust.works isn’t immune to that either, so that’s that.
Locking down comments won’t stop me (or others) from posting here either and I’m going to keep posting here for the forseeable future. So if you’re here just for the content, you don’t have to worry.
I hope you guys can provide me with some input on this, because as it stands, I don’t want to upset what we have right now, so this is something I can only do with your agreement. Let me know what you think about this issue and whether you consider it an issue at all. You can comment here, send me a DM or talk to me on my matrix chat, which should be working. Any feedback will be helpful here. Thanks
Centralizing kinda defeats the entire benefit of federation. It really isn’t that hard to get used to multiple versions of a c/ name existing.
Anyone coming from reddit and expecting everything to be in a single spot is going to have to get past it eventually because it doesn’t matter at all. You can try to lock this c/, and start elsewhere, but you don’t own the name. You don’t even own this c/, unless you’re an alt account for thedude, who does own sh.itjust.works.
Your best bet is to keep moderating this c/ and let users figure out how lemmy and federation actually work rather than trying to lock things down that you literally can’t lock down in the first place.
We all have to let go of reddit’s way of doing things, and the sooner we do that, the better.
Wrote a long winded-reply and my internet cut off when I sent it so I’ll keep it brief. I agree that we don’t want to centralize. However, Lemmy isn’t feature complete. I’d love us to have some more reach. I don’t need control over where that reach goes or how big this community gets, I just want it to be big enough to be functional. And functional means having enough folks with knowledge to help out new guys and being able to able to post a thread looking for advice and be likely to get replies. That’s all I want. And for that to be a reality, Lemmy needs to step up it’s cross-posting game from reddit. I don’t like the attitude of FOSS community with regards to things like Linux, that user experience issues is a user problem, not a software problem, “just use the console, bro”, though that’s been getting better over the years. I just have to disagree there, it’s only valid up to a certain point that is reached far too quickly. I feel like we shouldn’t make it harder on users than we absolutely have to.
That said, you’re right, I don’t own this c/ and I don’t dictate the rules. I just hope that the rules we can agree on will help us build a community that people want to join. That’s my goal.