What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it’s not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.
Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case “communities” would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.
Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.
A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there’s so many categories that could be applied to each.
What are your thoughts?
I guess it’s the point of the fediverse as far as I understand. Kind of like being members of a bunch of old school forums. Unfortunately for me it’s not really what I’m looking for, and I like the unified aspect of reddit.
unified is nice, but if i’ve learnt anything over the past 9-10 years as a redditor, it means you’re at the mercy of admins and power mods. And because it’s become the go-to forum, it’s gotten so much attention from stealth marketers and bots (it’s hard not to unsee such posts once you learn to identify them), and karma whores trying to get the first witty remark in so it’ll get boosted up into the first top-level comment.
I kinda like the idea of a fediverse - it’s like a bunch of forums, but connected in a way that makes it so much easier to browse and read all of them, and doesn’t have the “centralisation of power” problem reddit has.
I think the main point of decentralization is to spread the burden of hosting around so that no individual has control of the system. I think having themed servers like what you’re suggesting would aid in discoverability of different communities, but the downside is that that would mean individual servers would have monopolies on certain subjects.
Exactly. Also, people might not want their handle being associated with a specific niche hobby they have, though they might be there a lot/all the time (e.g. I don’t want to be “ewe@hentainsfw”, but I sure as shit am going to be spending a lot of time there).
I kind of feel like it would be best if we had some “user” instances that are nice and always up and most of the communities lived on “community” instances either grouped or just spread out. That way if any single community gets too big on an instance, it doesn’t necessarily bog a bunch of users down as well (e.g. all the users on lemmy.ml that are hamstrung by being on the overloaded hardware on that instance).
Over on Mastodon I’m at mastodon.world purely because it’s the most generic sounding instance and I don’t particularly want to have my whole identity to be defined by where I live or the operating system that I use or whatever
@_finger_
We can have both generic instances and instances around a particular topic.We already have a few lemmy dedicated to a particular community like latte.isnot.coffee and startrek.website
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”.
But you don’t have to create accounts on multiple instances. You can subscribe, post, and mod communities on other federated servers.
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don’t think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.
Hopping between instances would have to be simplified significantly.
I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I’ve never felt the need to hop between instances.
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.
Exactly, it’s really inconvenient right now. And it’s really important for the usability of what OP suggested.
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
And I highly disagree with only being important at the start. It’s a big hurdle that stifles growth right now and in the future.
You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed
That’s more of the interface you’re using a fault for not interpreting links correctly - it should be obvious that url/c/communityname should be interpreted as a community, just as !communityname@instance.org (right now jerboa is interpreting it as an email address) should also be interpreted as one, and if you remove the ! It should be interpreted as a username.
But most interfaces are open source, so give them time and someone (maybe even you) can submit a pull request that fixes it. That’s the beauty of open source - in time the bugs get ironed out because it’s a collaborative effort.
Agreed, what needs to happen is an option that allows users to follow links from foreign instances in their home instance seamlessly. I have to imagine with the ramped up amount of development in lemmy that some of the devs must be working on it.
Yes you can subscribe to and read that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.
Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)
This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.
On the next page, change the search dropdown from Communities to ALL.
You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.
Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribersClick it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”
Done
No, that’s not right You can follow any community from any instance with your account, doesn’t matter where you registered your account. I just subscribed to https://beehaw.org/c/programming from lemmy.pt user account
this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn’t work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
This is good but at the moment the user base isn’t big enough to support splitting interests like that.
My thoughts are what if the instance admins or mods are pricks? What if the instance shuts down?
I think the power of the fediverse is that there is redundancy with the communities on different instances. I feel like it’s a very human need to have everything neatly organized and in its place, but the internet is all about redundancy to ensure no single points of failure.
The fediverse mimics that by creating a web of small related communities, spread out over multiple instances, ran by different people, rather than a giant single community for one thing, on one instance, run by one person.
This was the case with Reddit as well, there were a lot of competing subs created due to shitty mods and rules so I don’t think it’d be much different in this case
There was a r/Yankees subreddit that had awful mods, so some people created r/Nyyankees and basically everyone moved there.
Would be nice if it was “divided” by user types too. Imagine a post about a new Marvel movie and you could view a shared comment thread but also filter to remove “marvel-fans”, or see only “cineasts”, without leaving the thread. Could lead to more bubbles, but could also make it really easy to see what other bubbles are thinking.
Wouldn’t the risk be though, that an instance devoted to music, for example, would mean that all music discussion would fall under the control of a single mod/team, opening us up to the kind of controlling shenanigans Reddit was pulling?
And were the instance to go down, it would take everything on that topic with it.
I realise that people would still be free to make their own community on any topic on any instance, but if instances were topic themed, they would likely soon dominate any “independent” communities on that same topic.
All that said, I still have a limited understanding of the fediverse, so perhaps it’s not an issue.
I definitely see the point but I think the beauty is that there’s nothing stopping someone from creating a competing themed instance in the event that a mod is a shithead. The ability to link external instances is a great feature but it can get a tad tedious to link all the ones you like from each source. The problem I think is deciding how to choose which instance is your “main” that you’d use to link all external content to.
Maybe a way to solve that problem is to not mimic Reddit’s subreddit architecture, so that if I create a Star Wars or LOTR community on an instance that I could also add sections within it for specific topics. I wouldn’t want tags to be a thing because it’s just a search filter essentially, having separate sections would add a greater ability to organize topics to their respective places similar to how a forum works.
I love how y’all have just invented what we used to refer to as “a forum” 😂
Before reddit, Badger and Blade was a forum dedicated to traditional wet shaving, with sub forums for double edged razors, single edge razors, old school straight razors, badger hair brushes, different shaving soaps, and some other nice manly things like knives or fountain pens or leather goods or what have you.
If people didn’t like B&B, there was also The Shave Den, a similar forum with different mods and different rules and some similar sub forums.
For tech you could (and still can) join linustechtips.com or there were probably others for Chris Parillo or TWiT or Cali Lewis or whatever.
Yes we’ve essentially done that, with the major addition that lemmys “forums” are all interconnected, and you can subscribe to them. You can browse one with the account of another.
You could say Reddit was the same - a set of forums that you “subscribe” to,
So really the order is forum > Reddit(+subscriptions +voting) > Lemmy (+federation/interconnection)
I think it will more of less follow that path naturally in the years to come, if it ever catches on. You can already see this happening with some instances (ie lemmy.ca mostly devoted to canadian topics, etc)
You have to remember that the amount of lemmy servers exploded in the past week or so. We’re pretty much figuring this out collectively
waveform.social is handling a lot of music-making topics. I think this is better than simply being region based. I understand the need for communities of different languages but I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions. Instances based on similar interests makes the most sense to me.
It may make a difference in speed if you are closer to the actual server (IE, it’s in your country)
I don’t really think we need a rule to it. And honestly, what about when themes overlap? Do we get dividing communities just because?
Also, it would just promote an echo chamber like Twitter.
Communities does what you want already. In time, some will pop off and become the popular ones. Maybe some will be split because of users not agreeing with something, but that already happened on Reddit as well.
Currently users of Lemmy are “power users”. The fact that power users can’t even work out how to use Lemmy ‘properly’ is sign of its future
Idk, I got here and I’m sort of an idjit
It’s arguably a sign that there is need for refinement, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, jeez. Every platforms’ early days were much like this. Reddit was pretty shit at first. YouTube was pretty shit at first. And so on.
Nothing comes to life without teething pains. We’re literally on day two for most users, it’s bizarre to be saying anything about Lemmy’s future this early.
Power users?
It’s a term that broadly refers to people with more experience in a technology and more ability to extract use from it.
AI and machine learning tech instance over here looking for members. ran themed communities BEFORE reddit and slashdot, doing it again.
I saw the scramble exodus from twitter to fedi, specifcally mastodon, when elon took over, give it time, when it first happened the Main instance Mastodon.social was swarmed aswell as the instances listed in mastodons Website at the time, over time more instances popped up with themes, im aware of lemmy-php which uses phpbb What doomed lemmy migration is how short the Protest is, over the 3 month Period with twitter fediverse microblogging adapted, just as reddit Corp will ride the wave so will lemmy with minor change, what needs to happen is the suggested “indefinite Protest” it will make lemmy instances pop up with themes, and smaller instances contributing to federation Themed instances already include lemmygrad.ml
You really need to use better grammar and punctuation, my dude… That was a rough read.
Sorry for no reply but I do not really know english grammar
I agree with what you’re saying. I’ve been contemplating back and forth about whether I should create a board game instant where you gather various board game discussions in the same instant.
I think it’s worth a try to see what happens, the concern of giving too much power to one instance for one topic is definitely valid but there’s also a benefit to it as well. Maybe Im looking at it wrong, in that the accounts are separated for each instance so for example if I wanted to only see posts from your board game instance I’d need to switch accounts rather than add all the communities to my .world instance which could get messy and not preferable in some cases. What might make it more effective and granular is the ability to add multiple categories or topic sections in your instance. For instance if you created a board games community in Lemmy.world there’s no ability to do this aside from creating separate communities for each subcategory of niche interests. So instead of being able to create Lemmy.world/boardgames/StarWars or Lemmy.world/boardgames/LOTR you have to create Lemmy.world/starwarsboardgames or Lemmy.world/lotrboardgames. which can get a bit messy.
