Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

  • people having to subscribe to both to see the content
  • posters having to crosspost to both
  • comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

  • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m also curious about users. If this instance basically federates with every instance, even the most bigoted one, wouldn’t it become a host for users with maligned interests? And communities on that instance would be a very dangerous and noisy space too for the same reason.

    • BlazeOP
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      1 year ago

      The instance would only hosts a few communities (!fediverse, and maybe a few others).

      Users would not be allowed to register there. Moderation would indeed need to be heavy, you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment (you would have to ask a moderator to open a topic. Cumbersome, but at least you prevent topic spamming).

      • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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        1 year ago

        you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment

        I don’t really think this is viable. Most posts on c/fediverse, c/lemmy, c/plugins, etc. are made by users, and these are quite active communities, I doubt mods will be able to deal with the load.

        • BlazeOP
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          1 year ago

          That’s a fair point.

          Interestingly enough, !plugins@sh.itjust.works is a good case of a single community where no other community exists on that topic, and it seems to be doing well.

          • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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            1 year ago

            True, but it also means Beehaw users can’t really reach new plugins/themes announcements. And I’m not sure how many other instances defederated from sh.itjust.works tbh.

            • BlazeOP
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              1 year ago

              That’s also a very good point. I assume current Beehaw users who want to access that community use alts.

              I actually saw a complaint the other day about !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works not being accessible from Beehaw.

              • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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                1 year ago

                Defederation sucks a lot. And since Reddit migration is over and everything seems much more stable, I think Beehaw could refederate with shitjustworks easily.

                • BlazeOP
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                  1 year ago

                  On a completely related topic, your instance looks interesting, how did you find it?

                  • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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                    1 year ago

                    I wanted to move away from the defederation drama on average-to-big instances (I was on blahaj) and checked instances with >200 users. I quite like the branding of this one so decided to give it a shot. I’m only a week here but can say my experience was smooth and stable so far.