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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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[-] PriorProject@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure you can't post to community-instance if they're down/having issues to the local DB. The instance I'm on is very stable and every time I think it may be an issue, it turns out to be the other instance.

I can't disprove this. My experience when lemmy.ml was struggling was that I could comment-reply and vote consistently even though many of the communities I'm active in are on that struggling server. But maybe I was just lucky. I can't explain the behavior you observed, and it may be that certain operations are more directly passed through to the community-hosting instance than I previously believed.

But irrespective of the details, plain federation does provide some significant resilience to transient instance failure, and there's probably room to tune it further in at least some ways.

Interesting discussion, though.

[-] MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, yeah I should clarify that I was able to comment on existing posts, but could not submit a new post. Fun discussion, agreed!

[-] PriorProject@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's the difference then, I do A LOT more commenting than posting. Perhaps there's some essential reason they're handled differently or hopefully an accidental one and posts could be made to behave more like comments someday.