Lemmy needs better integration/federation. Too much content is hidden. A community on the biggest instance was not visible to me on another large instance.
Lemmy needs better integration/federation. Too much content is hidden. A community on the biggest instance was not visible to me on another large instance.
I did a search from shitjustworks for "reddit die" and did not find https://lemmy.world/c/watchredditdie so I made https://sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie (unnecessarily). This should really not happen. When someone makes a community there should be a "ping" sent out to notify all other federated instances.
And from what I know, if I post to !sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie only users on sh.itjust.works will see the posts until other people from other instances randomly come across it somehow and subscribe? This really needs to be improved.
The devs actually talked about this in the AMA from a couple of days ago. Sounds like the current plan is to have all federating servers send their entire list of communities to each other on a regular basis.
The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is Lemmy Community Boost which is basically a bot that serves the same purpose.
https://boost.lemy.lol <- link to it, doesnt work for instances not connected to it like lemmy.world but theres still ~ 26 major ones
Thanks for reminding me that there was an AMA I forgot about lol.
Great news.
I'm surprised there was no issue filed for this already, maybe I just failed to find it, but I made a new issue
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4412
if anyone wants to give it a thumbs up reaction then the devs will know to prioritize it, and if you have any ideas you could leave a comment there
Edit: that was somewhat a duplicate of this issue
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
Give that one a thumbs up
Perfect, thank you!
The community you're trying to subscribe to only has one post, and I believe that post may predate your instance spinning up.
It's not really a good example of federation on Lemmy, because it doesn't have content to federate.
Even your ping idea wouldn't have worked here
Even your ping idea wouldn’t have worked here
Why not? When the person created the sub it would have sent out a ping to all federated instances, and thus when any account on a federated instance searches the keyword they would find that sub. IE: each instance would have a list of subs of all other federated instances. Like a sitemap.
As I said, I think the only post in the community you were looking at was made before your instance was up and running and able to be pinged
Isn’t that intentional though? I don’t believe many instances, especially the small ones, can afford to federate every community. Sure, sometimes it can be a bit annoying but you can always check on lemmyverse.
It should show up in community search even if they're not constantly pulling down every single post of those communities
And just the instance metadata is tiny
Fair enough
As a middle-ground, I think it's enough to only sync the community name and user count and maybe the description. More isn't shown in the search anyway and those 3 data points shouldn't take too much storage.
Syncing name solves the problem of communities not showing up. The problem with only being shown posts in a community someone on the instance has already subscribed to is more difficult, as you wrote.
Descriptions can be of arbitrary length. Date and time of the most recent activity might be more realistic and useful.
A good implementation would be a warning at the creation of a community. Lemmy looks if a community already exist on the instances and display them. It would be on top of a better search.
Lemmyverse.net show both communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=watchreddit
It probably didn't show up in the first place it only has 66 subscribers, and probably none on SJW.
About your second point, you indeed have to promote your community, using [email protected], or related communities. This works quite well usually.
I will add that in your case, people knew about your community as you posted in other communities, but as discussed then, people seemed happy with the existing Reddit-focused communities.
This works quite well usually.
I definitely don't agree. I think this is very problematic. I rely on
allto find new communities. I don't think onenewcommunitiessub is a valid replacement. It would suffer from the same issue -- people would have to spam their post to every single instances'snewcommunitiessub, which is ridiculous and not even viable.Relying on !all to have your newly created community to reach most of the people could work, but using the Scaled sort as it wouldn't have enough subscribers to push it using Hot or Active.
There is only one [email protected], it has 15k subscribers, seems like a pretty good way to promote it.
Yeah there's a tool called LCB (Lemmy Community Boost but it's not a perfect solution to this issue. A good idea would be to have something like that built right into Lemmy, where instances can have an internal account that will look for and subscribe to communities which opt into discovery.
Soemthing like how the join-lemmy site works where it finds instances, but for communities. Obviously this would need to be enabled and allowed by instance moderators, smaller instances and personal ones with limited space probably don't want to pull from every community in the fediverse, but for larger ones, such a feature would be greatly beneficial.
So like https://boost.lemy.lol/ ?
Tip is to feature it on the [email protected] community, crosspost the first few posts from there to more popular communities, and be sure to link various discussion threads from that community in other communities. Get people interested enough to Subscribe then posts will spread to that instance.
This inconvenience is partly by design in Lemmy. People that start up a new server don't want to have ALL the content across the Fediverse rush through and explode their PC or hosted VM. Or a troll that makes a new community, spams a bunch of posts or puts up illegal material in a new community can easily be caught in the home instance before it spreads to others.
Isn't it mostly text? Why would that be a heavy burden? Isn't there an option to disable local hosting of images & videos?
Lemmy was able to be hosted on 1GB RAM machines, which may still work but less likely to be a good experience if you have too many instances in the federation queue even with just text. With images on, the biggest problem is the storage needs grew a lot.
Sharing/publishing lists of communities on a server to allow for automated subscribing seems like a good interim measure.
Yeah, that's the issue federation for lemmy have. I'm from a very small instance and my "All" feed only shows just a fraction of community from those big instance. If i need more community post showing i need to manually request federation for each and every community. It's not too big of an issue if you're from big instance as people will likely look for more community to subscribe, but for small instance it will be barren most of the time if no one try to look for new community using external browser, which makes people migrate to bigger instance, and defeat the purpose of having multiple instance.
Though i must say, manually federating is quite fast these day, i remember last year i have to keep refreshing for it to shows, and it take hours for the content to federate. The dev surely do magic.
For small instances, admins can use tools like https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs to subscribe to most of the active communities.
Thanks! I've been thinking about this sort of tool but didn't went to look for it
It’s not too big of an issue if you’re from big instance as people will likely look for more community to subscribe
Yeah that's what I thought, and I assumed that shitjustworks was big enough to not have to worry about that, but apparently not. So I think this is one of the biggest problems with lemmy right now.
which makes people migrate to bigger instance, and defeat the purpose of having multiple instance
Bingo.
Yes. Lemmy is deep in "good enough" territory. It mostly works for most people, much of the time. But if you stray outside of the main use cases, you're gonna be disappointed.
Pressure your instance to join https://boost.lemy.lol and pressure your mods to add the community there (or you can add it yourself if the instance is already part of the project).
Something tells me that neither one of those communities are going anywhere anyway. No matter what tweaking is done to Lemmy. The one you mentioned is so dead you might as well have made another. There’s already Reddit themed communities that are meant for the same thing really as that’s all most of us want it to do is die.
Indeed, I mentioned this to OP as well in his post on [email protected] a few days ago
This. I want to be able to see every community of every instance i‘m federated with with post and sub count. Thats a laughable amount of data. This would boost subscriptions by insane amounts.
The number of subscribers being completely different depending on which instance you search from is really weird/bad too IMO.
I don’t think it’s bad thing that content is hidden.
To me, it’s comforting to think of cyberspace as being kind of like the real world. And in the real world, there’s distance. You can be near or far from things. You can travel, and the longer you travel the further you go. Things percolate through at a steady pace, and so everything’s not perfectly mixed but there are different zones with things going on.
When we had cyberspace shown to us in Snow Crash or Disclosure or NetRunner, it was always a space. Like a second world you could go live a life in.
I know it’s a loose connection, but I like how, in order to discover more instances I might have to travel to neighboring instances and then from there to others. Like each user you hear from has an instance in their username. That’s a way to discover instances.
And having redundant communities? That’s a great idea. Then you get that separation and divergent/recombinant evolution in those communities too.
Just a thought. As we add features, and remove constraints, from lemmy, we make serious architectural choices that will affect the way it feels and acts as space for communities to grow in.
We call it a Fediverse not a Fedidatabase. A ‘verse is a place you go through, at a speed, taking time. A ‘verse is a vast and wide place.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected], [email protected]
And this is another issue which hinders discoverability. It's nice there are tools and workarounds but their existence also signals the issue exists.
I really don't know how this is supposed to catch on, to be honest.
You can browse by instance on swift.
What is that?
If instances don’t want to federate with some or all other instances, that is their choice, and that’s on purpose. Some just want to have smaller communities, stronger moderation, and sometimes be entirely private.
If you’re looking for instances that federate with most, you should choose yours accordingly. And I think you won’t have an issue with that, because most popular instances chose to go this route.
This is not about federation between instances. It's about how community discovery within federated instances works. Currently it's definitely sub-par.
Why is it that an instance decides for me which instances I can see? Why is it that mods are deciding for me which comments are censored?
Instances are the ones hosting the data on their servers + things not having mods can devolve very quickly with things like the nazi bar problem or the scam links that have been getting posted and removed in some communities. This is a different thing than whats in the post though, the post is talking about all communities needing to be fetched manually the first time theyre viewed
