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Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Over the past few days, I've witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

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[-] veroxii@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago

Yes the fragmentation is a feature not a bug. There are dozens of reasons why people might want to leave a community and create their own alternative version. With blackjack and hookers.

Combining communities should be a front end feature... Allow users to merge their views if they want. But it should not be enforced at the backend or federation level.

Eventually there will be third party apps which can do this merging in their interface if someone wants it.

[-] OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Combining communities should be a front end feature… Allow users to merge their views if they want. But it should not be enforced at the backend or federation level.

Eventually there will be third party apps which can do this merging in their interface if someone wants it.

I agree with this. The grouping should be a front-end feature based on hashtags, as someone else mentioned, instead of the community names. Alternatively, there could be lists that you can simply copy and paste to create your own multireddit, eliminating the need for hashtags. However, considering that the original issue was already on the lemmy-ui, I'm not sure why you brought up the backend.

[-] veroxii@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

One thing I do agree with is that discoverability should be better. Can't remember the url now but there's a site which crawls all instances and creates a searchable list of all communities. This should seriously be built in. Have all instances generate a list of all communities which is broadcast, cached by all, and searchable by all.

This "paste a url of a community you already found into the search box" concept is not good enough.