Asklemmy @lemmy.ml blitzen @lemmy.ml 1y ago

How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

With Lemmy, doesn't it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example [email protected] and [email protected]. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?

This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I'm quite enjoying myself here.

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Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.
- I thank you for your response, and generally think you are right. Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit to: is the existence of multiple communities on a given subject a feature of Lemmy (perhaps even unique to Lemmy) we should expect and embrace, or do you think communities coalescing into few/one will occur naturally?
  
  Not the person you asked but personally I do think it'll naturally happen that we just end up glomming together into certain communities. That's how it tends to go with any such thing. But one slightly overlooked benefit is that splinter communities can have the same name. No passive-agressive "/c/thetopic", "/c/realthetopic", "/c/betterthetopic", "/c/thetopicwithouttoxicmods" etc etc etc.
  
  r/truefilm comes to mind; that's a great point.
  
  Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy "subreddit" that share the same name not be able to see the other?
  
  Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?
  
  Nope! That's why community names are often formatted like community@website. As many instances can use the same community name as they like, everyone can see and individually interact with each of them. Even if two communities are both named tech, they are still distinct from one another by the website that's hosting them.
  
  No the domain name is always part of the ID unless it’s your home instance.
  
  A very precise way to phrase this is to say:
  
  There is no community called technology on Lemmy. There is a community called [email protected] and a separate community called [email protected]. They are different communities with different mods that discuss similar topics. Their proper "names" are comprised of BOTH the topic description AND the home instance.
  
  Every community on Reddit happens to share the same home instance, like [email protected], but it makes very little difference if you start thinking of the sub-name as just being comprised of both parts.
  
  Another funny wrinkle is that your home instance will often (always?) hide the instance name from local communities. So for someone with an account on lemmy.ml, [email protected] will look like just plain old technology. But this is just how the UI styles local communities, they still homed to the instance where your account is, and they are still most precisely and correctly described with their full identifier, including their instance name as anything else is ambiguous to people with accounts on various different instances.
  
  Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit to: is the existence of multiple communities on a given subject a feature of Lemmy (perhaps even unique to Lemmy) we should expect and embrace, or do you think communities coalescing into few/one will occur naturally?
  
  My take is that Reddit, Lemmy, and any system that allows non-admins to create subreddits/sublemmies/communities/whatever pretty much plays out similarly:
  
  Overlapping communities are a feature of lemmy, but also reddit.
  
  They are not unique to lemmy.
  
  People DO embrace overlapping communities to work out differences in moderation policies, to escape annoying culture, to achieve a smaller/cozier feel. But all this is hard work, and generally... unless there's a reason to do extra hard work to maintain a smaller duplicate community...
  
  Communities coalesce into few/one naturally.
  
  I don''t feel like any of this is really different in the fediverse, the only difference is that the community name is longer [email protected] instead of /r/tech. But [email protected] and [email protected] isn't functionally any different than /r/tech and /r/otherTechSucksOursIsGood. The social dynamics that determine community participation play out in almost exactly the same way in both cases.
  
  The few exceptions are with a lemmy instance that doesn't federate to any/most instances and has limited account signups. That sort of lemmy instance could create intentionally separate communities that are really tightly controlled. So you could talk about tech news exclusively with computer-science students at your university or something. But at that point it's less like lemmy the fediverse app and more like a standalone bulletin-board system like phpbb or something. For almost all lemmy instances and almost all communities on them, overlapping lemmy communities behave very similarly to overlapping subreddits.

89 comments