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Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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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[-] dreadpirateroberts@lemm.ee 41 points 1 year ago

I don’t think I’m understanding this right cause it sounds like you’re trying to make it more fun by adding more rules. If there are 20 groups that are all about pickles that’s fine they each like running things their own way. Eventually one group gets popular and that’s where the majority goes. I think your frustration could better be solved with something like tags where groups could choose to associate certain tags words that makes search easier like tag: pickles-fermenting-homemade-cucumbers and that could clear up search from people just wanting to share pickle Rick memes.

[-] oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thing is that say i want to see all the pickle content across the lemmy-verse, i want to just be able to subscribe to an umbrella "pickles" category and get all the c/pickles content from any instance my instance federates with without worrying that i missed a community or something. If there are 20 groups but i only know of 1 or 2, odds are that i'll miss the biggest ones with a bunch of pickle content that i want. And I don't want to have to manually go through, search for all the biggest instances, and subscribe to each pickle community one by one. Plus, say a new instance is started and it's pickles community blows up. I'll miss it because i already searched through and subscribed to all the pickles communities that were available when i joined. I'd rather default to subscribing to all the c/pickles communities my instance sees, and then if one instance is posting stuff i don't want to see i could manually exclude them

Tldr I guess it depends what you think will take more effort to do manually. I think having to manually find and subscribe to every community i want from across the lemmyverse (and periodically run the search again to find new communities) would be way more work than subscribing to every c/pickles my instance can see and manually excluding the instances or instance-specific-communities i don't want content from

[-] Trepidation@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I'm new to the whole concept of federation, so please let me know if I'm missing something fundamental, but with your proposal (subscribing to all c/pickles) works for when each instance has the same general rules for posts, but what about when one c/pickles on some server is actually about... dildos? (like r/trees was about pot, and r/marijuanaenthusiasts was about trees)?

Wouldn't your feed be polluted with pics and reviews of dildos when you want wholesome and healthy pickle recipes?

[-] oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

That's where manually being able to block specific instances would come in. So if you subscribe to every c/pickles your instance federates with but then didlos.lemmy/c/pickles starts causing problems, you could manually block that one instance. Or maybe you want to see dildos but not when you're looking at pickles, you could choose to manually exclude didlos.lemmy/c/pickles from your c/pickles subscription

[-] Trepidation@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

That makes sense, but sounds like it'd be a constant spam battle. Maybe I'm overthinking it, or just thinking about how I'd go about breaking/attacking something to try to figure out how to fix it.

[-] oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah it could be, but keep in mind it would only include communities from instances that your instance federates with. So if your instance has blocked another instance it wouldn't be included in the group. This issue actually describes it really well and is better thought out than what i've described https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113