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Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Fedigrow
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86 users here now
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to organize overall fediverse growth
- !reddit@lemmy.world to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Custom feeds grouping similar communities
That was addressed in the article under Proposal 2:
Personally I think proposal 2 and 3 should happen concurrently. Using the example in the post I would setup a custom feed (that can hopefully consolidate cross posts) for breakfast. I would put pancakes@a.com which subscribes to pancakemasters@b.com I can also add pancakeart@a.com and waffles@a.com. so when someone posts about the best homemade peanut butter syrup recipe that is cross posted to my pancake and waffle communities, I don't get 4 posts about it, I can see it once and choose where to reply (pancakes obviously, I'm a waffle purist).
Community interlinking/subscription fixes a slightly different problem than custom feeds IMO. It's a really good idea, but I would personally still want custom feeds (with the ability to handle crossposts in a customizable way).
It shouldn't be difficult to group some community automatically then users can edit it if they want
How would automatic grouping work?
Even if the communities are grouped, a given post or comment would still show up in only one community, and people not using the grouped view wouldn't see it. Proposal 3 would solve that issue.
If they are similar, why not consolidate?
Better to not have to start over 100% if the main community is on a server that randomly disappears forever or turns sour and gets defederated.
There is no community backup for those ones, they seem to be doing fine:
Instance shutting down is indeed a valid risk, but it shouldn't be handled at the community level
!europe@feddit.org and !dach@feddit.org was formerly on the now closed feddit.de I think. It took me sometime to find them again…
Edit: I think a better solution is for us to custom group similar communities.
I'm glad you've been lucky enough to not lose any of your favorite communities. The server (tchncs.de) my user is currently on is my 3rd Lemmy provider to date. The other two just evaporated and took the communities I modded for with them. Thankfully the one I cared about already had a dupe - which is still going strong.
Part of the point of a meta community system (that could serve to consolidate and solve your problem) is that then all communities would be divorced from their hosts. Then (as an example), if the UK government pulled an Apple with feddit.uk and feddit suddenly shuttered to avoid it, those communities would/could be grafted on to another server, intact.
I've lost !moviesandtv@lemmy.film when the instance shut down. I still advocate for one community.
Should lemm.ee go down, I would recreate the community elsewhere and post on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
I've rebuilt !moviesandtv@lemm.ee , now abandoned.
I've built !movies@lemm.ee. I can do it a fourth time.
Because each instance and community had it's own rules. With custom feeds user can choose with communities he want to consolidate and separate them again if he want
What are the rules differences between !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@lemm.ee ?
!movies@lemmy.world allows shitposts/memes. It's a big deal to some people like me
!movies@lemm.ee does too: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19486392
Ok my mistake but that is just one example. They may exists some two similar community with different rules. I constantly read people opinions on the fediverse selling point was about it being censorship resistant because you can switch to another instance
It is, but that's an emergency measure, not a day to day basis
In those cases, the communities should not consolidate, and would not "follow each other" under Proposal 3.
So the solution may only reduce the duplications but not fix it completely. A lot of communities are already dead with no active admins
Admins or mods?
If a community has no active mods, you can usually request it from the admins. If an instance has no active admins, it will probably shut down soon.
Because problems could arise by relying on a single community. Proposal 3 retains the duplicate communities while eliminating the problems that duplicate communities currrently cause.