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.
That would still create a fragmented comment situation. Ideally, the server should be aware of “sister communities”, so it could merge the comment threads, or at least tell the client to do so. But that has all kinds of moderation implications, as noted elsewhere.
In the end you’re either doing federation on community level (which would require another level of federation administration - you can’t just merge like-named communities from Any instance), or you’d have to convince 1 community to go read only and refer to the “defacto” community.
The first one has a lot of technical hurdles (servers and clients would have to adapt, and then community admins would be responsible for deciding who to federate their communities with). The second depends on mods giving up their community, which is unlikely and undesirable in case of defederation. Or option 3: keep the status quo, of course.