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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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[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 28 points 2 years ago

I like the general idea of merging communities, but I'm not sure if I like the idea of it being automatic. What if instead communities could apply "hashtags" for their community, and then you could efficiently browse multiple communities at once. For example, I'm subscribed to a few different TTRPG communities across a few different instances, but what if each of those communities was tagged "#ttrpg" and then I could browse #ttrpg instead of browsing any of those individual communities.

[-] OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 2 years ago

I think conflicts can arise with hashtags just as easily as with community names, so it might be better to have an updatable and moderatable link instead.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 years ago

Can you explain how conflicts can arrive with hashtags? I thought the whole idea is that they just let you tag content with its topics

[-] OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Oh, I thought it was about tagging the communities and merging them based on those tags. Are you suggesting tagging the posts instead, and displaying all posts tagged the same from all communities across all federated instances in the same location?

But this can already be accomplished with the search feature. You only need to select 'Local' or 'All' and search for a word. People shouldn't be forced to hashtag every post, so the result would be the same as it is now.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago

It could be done at the community or post level. I think because of the Mastodon backend Lemmy already supports hashtagging posts. But yeah my idea is that tagging communities would make it easy to merge communities with similar scopes

[-] OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

There could be conflicts between hashtags, as a hashtag for one community may not have the same meaning for another community. This would result in mixing topics and potential confusion.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 years ago

I suppose that's possible, but I don't really view it as a serious problem that sometimes words overlap.

[-] hydrospanner@vlemmy.net 3 points 2 years ago

I would definitely consider that a serious potential issue, if for no other reason than so many communities will likely find a use for tags based on the nature of the community structure.

For example, I could see a ton of communities having tags for things like modposts, new member intros, meta topics, memes, questions, reviews, how-to's/tutorials, guides, etc. and that's just for broad post types that would apply to thousands of communities.

I think letting users manually make their own multi-lems, perhaps with the ability for communities to sort of team up to make uber-lems of closely related communities to help users discover more of them...but sub, unsub, multi, and un-multi as they see fit...is likely the best approach.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

I'm not talking about communities having tags for posts, I'm suggesting communities could apply a hashtag to the community itself so that it would be easy to combine view of many communities with the same tag.

To use a Reddit example, imagine if r/gaming, r/games, and r/patientgamers all had "#videogames" applied to them. Then if you tried to view a multi based on which subreddits had #videogames, all three would show up in that multi.

[-] Anonymous0573@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

But one thing to consider is how divided it would be. Let's say I wanted to browse martial arts so I go to #martialarts. Now what about people adding stuff like #MMA or #karate. None of these would show up in #martialarts. Seems like hashtags would be even more divided than communities to me

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

The idea is that one community could apply many tags. So if you have karate communities from several Lemmy instances, browsing a multi-feed of #karate would show all of the communities you e subscribed to where the mods tagged their community with #karate. But the mods could also additionally tag their karate sub with #martialarts, and then it would show up in multi-feeds filtering on that hashtag as well

[-] Hypersapien@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

The hashtags could be very useful for finding communities you might be interested in though.

[-] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah hashtag congregation would be provlematic. It should just be a many to many table, each community should be able to add another community to have their posts shown and vice versa