What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it’s not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.
Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case “communities” would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.
Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.
A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there’s so many categories that could be applied to each.
What are your thoughts?
I think the main point of decentralization is to spread the burden of hosting around so that no individual has control of the system. I think having themed servers like what you’re suggesting would aid in discoverability of different communities, but the downside is that that would mean individual servers would have monopolies on certain subjects.
Exactly. Also, people might not want their handle being associated with a specific niche hobby they have, though they might be there a lot/all the time (e.g. I don’t want to be “ewe@hentainsfw”, but I sure as shit am going to be spending a lot of time there).
I kind of feel like it would be best if we had some “user” instances that are nice and always up and most of the communities lived on “community” instances either grouped or just spread out. That way if any single community gets too big on an instance, it doesn’t necessarily bog a bunch of users down as well (e.g. all the users on lemmy.ml that are hamstrung by being on the overloaded hardware on that instance).
Hopping between instances would have to be simplified significantly.
I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I’ve never felt the need to hop between instances.
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.
Exactly, it’s really inconvenient right now. And it’s really important for the usability of what OP suggested.
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
And I highly disagree with only being important at the start. It’s a big hurdle that stifles growth right now and in the future.
Agreed, what needs to happen is an option that allows users to follow links from foreign instances in their home instance seamlessly. I have to imagine with the ramped up amount of development in lemmy that some of the devs must be working on it.
No, that’s not right You can follow any community from any instance with your account, doesn’t matter where you registered your account. I just subscribed to https://beehaw.org/c/programming (/c/programming@beehaw.org) from lemmy.pt user account
this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn’t work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com
Read what I wrote, please.
There are changes to that being discussed on the project GitHub right now. Hopefully positive change is coming
That’s more of the interface you’re using a fault for not interpreting links correctly - it should be obvious that url/c/communityname should be interpreted as a community, just as !communityname@instance.org (right now jerboa is interpreting it as an email address) should also be interpreted as one, and if you remove the ! It should be interpreted as a username.
But most interfaces are open source, so give them time and someone (maybe even you) can submit a pull request that fixes it. That’s the beauty of open source - in time the bugs get ironed out because it’s a collaborative effort.
You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed
Yes you can subscribe to and read that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.
Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)
This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.
On the next page, change the search dropdown from Communities to ALL.
You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.
Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribersClick it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”
Done
Jesus Christ. I’m well aware of how you can subscribe to other instances. This is about convenience, with problems arising from situations like I described above.
Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.
There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.
At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
I’m currently working on a Lemmy mobile client and have implemented multi-accounts until it’s easier to do this. Basically you can make multiple accounts on different instances and aggregate the data from them all into a single feed. It doesn’t currently prioritize posting from specific accounts (you just select a primary)–I’m trying to figure out a good way to go about doing it so you can section things off 👀
Why do you need multiple accounts on different instances. You can have an account join a community on a different instance.
How? I know I can follow a community but I can’t get a general feed of that instance. That’s the issue they’re solving
Having the ability to link your account to different instances might be a way to solve that, or you have the ability to keep accounts separate depending on the instance. Right now we can link specific communities from other instances to another instance which is great, but being able to switch instances easily from one master account would be pretty great
@_finger_
We can have both generic instances and instances around a particular topic.We already have a few lemmy dedicated to a particular community like latte.isnot.coffee and startrek.website
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”.
But you don’t have to create accounts on multiple instances. You can subscribe, post, and mod communities on other federated servers.
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don’t think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.
My thoughts are what if the instance admins or mods are pricks? What if the instance shuts down?
I think the power of the fediverse is that there is redundancy with the communities on different instances. I feel like it’s a very human need to have everything neatly organized and in its place, but the internet is all about redundancy to ensure no single points of failure.
The fediverse mimics that by creating a web of small related communities, spread out over multiple instances, ran by different people, rather than a giant single community for one thing, on one instance, run by one person.
This was the case with Reddit as well, there were a lot of competing subs created due to shitty mods and rules so I don’t think it’d be much different in this case
There was a r/Yankees subreddit that had awful mods, so some people created r/Nyyankees and basically everyone moved there.
I think it will more of less follow that path naturally in the years to come, if it ever catches on. You can already see this happening with some instances (ie lemmy.ca mostly devoted to canadian topics, etc)
You have to remember that the amount of lemmy servers exploded in the past week or so. We’re pretty much figuring this out collectively
I agree. I think it’s going to be a bit of column A and a bit of column B. There will be the large general instances. Along with more regional and topical instances like feddit.de and programming.dev. Then a whole bunch of small instances that represent the long tail.
waveform.social is handling a lot of music-making topics. I think this is better than simply being region based. I understand the need for communities of different languages but I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions. Instances based on similar interests makes the most sense to me.
I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions
Makes perfect sense for regional events. This can be anything like weather, disasters, military excercises, cultural or sports events, regional politics, infrastructure projects, astronomy …
On my local subreddit, I was able to check what that noise was that I just heard, where all the emergency vehicles are racing towards, or follow hilarious regional stories.
Of course, for non-regional topics like music (unless it’s a regional event) I’d go to a non-regional sub or community.
It may make a difference in speed if you are closer to the actually server (IE, it’s in your country)
Would be nice if it was “divided” by user types too. Imagine a post about a new Marvel movie and you could view a shared comment thread but also filter to remove “marvel-fans”, or see only “cineasts”, without leaving the thread. Could lead to more bubbles, but could also make it really easy to see what other bubbles are thinking.
Wouldn’t the risk be though, that an instance devoted to music, for example, would mean that all music discussion would fall under the control of a single mod/team, opening us up to the kind of controlling shenanigans Reddit was pulling?
And were the instance to go down, it would take everything on that topic with it.
I realise that people would still be free to make their own community on any topic on any instance, but if instances were topic themed, they would likely soon dominate any “independent” communities on that same topic.
All that said, I still have a limited understanding of the fediverse, so perhaps it’s not an issue.
I definitely see the point but I think the beauty is that there’s nothing stopping someone from creating a competing themed instance in the event that a mod is a shithead. The ability to link external instances is a great feature but it can get a tad tedious to link all the ones you like from each source. The problem I think is deciding how to choose which instance is your “main” that you’d use to link all external content to.
Maybe a way to solve that problem is to not mimic Reddit’s subreddit architecture, so that if I create a Star Wars or LOTR community on an instance that I could also add sections within it for specific topics. I wouldn’t want tags to be a thing because it’s just a search filter essentially, having separate sections would add a greater ability to organize topics to their respective places similar to how a forum works.
I love how y’all have just invented what we used to refer to as “a forum” 😂
Before reddit, Badger and Blade was a forum dedicated to traditional wet shaving, with sub forums for double edged razors, single edge razors, old school straight razors, badger hair brushes, different shaving soaps, and some other nice manly things like knives or fountain pens or leather goods or what have you.
If people didn’t like B&B, there was also The Shave Den, a similar forum with different mods and different rules and some similar sub forums.
For tech you could (and still can) join linustechtips.com or there were probably others for Chris Parillo or TWiT or Cali Lewis or whatever.
Yes we’ve essentially done that, with the major addition that lemmys “forums” are all interconnected, and you can subscribe to them. You can browse one with the account of another.
You could say Reddit was the same - a set of forums that you “subscribe” to,
So really the order is forum > Reddit(+subscriptions +voting) > Lemmy (+federation/interconnection)
I guess it’s the point of the fediverse as far as I understand. Kind of like being members of a bunch of old school forums. Unfortunately for me it’s not really what I’m looking for, and I like the unified aspect of reddit.
I agree with what you’re saying. I’ve been contemplating back and forth about whether I should create a board game instant where you gather various board game discussions in the same instant.
AI and machine learning tech instance over here looking for members. ran themed communities BEFORE reddit and slashdot, doing it again.
I believe it would be better for everything to be spread out across instances so the impact is lessened when an instance goes down.
Currently users of Lemmy are “power users”. The fact that power users can’t even work out how to use Lemmy ‘properly’ is sign of its future
Idk, I got here and I’m sort of an idjit
I saw the scramble exodus from twitter to fedi, specifcally mastodon, when elon took over, give it time, when it first happened the Main instance Mastodon.social was swarmed aswell as the instances listed in mastodons Website at the time, over time more instances popped up with themes, im aware of lemmy-php which uses phpbb What doomed lemmy migration is how short the Protest is, over the 3 month Period with twitter fediverse microblogging adapted, just as reddit Corp will ride the wave so will lemmy with minor change, what needs to happen is the suggested “indefinite Protest” it will make lemmy instances pop up with themes, and smaller instances contributing to federation Themed instances already include lemmygrad.ml
You really need to use better grammar and punctuation, my dude… That was a rough read.
Sorry for no reply but I do not really know english grammar
