It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.
It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.
It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.
Thoughts?
There’s many ways these communities could end up gathering over time given the features of the platform we have. The most likely in my opinion is that certain communities on certain instances will take off and gradually people will focus on those instead of the many duplicates on other instances. It’ll probably be quite a while before enough critical mass builds up.
Exactly what I think as well. Reddit had multiple subs for the same toppic, but only one of them really takes off, and the others just fizzle out or have a slightly more specific focus. Same will happen with the Fediverse.
Agreed. And it’s interesting to see how communities are spread out even among related topics. For example if you see my post here with a list of crafting / maker communities, generally the first one or two under each heading are the most active and they’re all over the place.
.world and .ml and kbin.social yes, but also .ca, blahaj, sopuli, and various others. And that’s just the quickly-establishing communities within one niche!
Users won’t know what the biggest instances are though if they can’t see the true user counts. People have to go to lemmyverse.net for that right now, which is very anti-ux. This needs to be integrated into lemmy itself
Honestly, good. People shouldn’t be picking based on quantity, but quality.
That quality will be splintered into multiple different communities with the current setup
How is that any different than reddit with all the r/X, r/TrueX, r/AltX, r/X2 subs? Whether they’re distributed amongst one instance or many, it’s functionally the same. Just like we already aggregate content from numerous sources, the fediverse also aggregates the communities too.
I’m subscribed to many communities/magazines in a variety of instances. And many of those I found through word of mouth on here or just by browsing “Hot”. They weren’t hard to find. I honestly don’t see the problem. It’s supposed to be splintered so no central authority has control. That’s the whole point.
This would generally suck and result in centralization, especially bad if any of the big communities end up in the hands of people like the lemmy.ml devs.
well, the good thing is, is that it’s way easier to just migrate to a different community than to a completely different platform like what happened with reddit.
The problem is network effects. It’s very hard to get mass migration so managers of very large generalized communities can get away with a lot of bullshit when they own the platform uncontested