I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
We all hate each other.
No, you hate me. I’m blameless. A victim, really.
How dare you, asshole. Always starting shit!
Hey, fuck you, shithead!
Anyway, see you in a thread about mechanical keyboards in five minutes.
And there’s our poor social skills.
Tbh, it feels too me like that is either Lemmy Shitpost or 196. Plus scrolling the front page rather than subscribed
youre not wrong. the signal has been lost on lemmy largely because ex-redditors flooded the fediverse with empty communities. soo many empty communities.
‘subreddits’/communities/magazines/groups should be created out of necessity to extract a specific signal (‘sub:toy building’) from a general-purpose feed (sub:‘general’)
then theres the whole distributed nature of the network issue which makes ‘auto subscription to general content’… interesting.
It’s a fundamental problem with the fediverse, it’s funny that one of the fediverses biggest features ‘decentralisation’ works against it
Someone had a similar question before about how the place was getting smaller and I actually posted about it somewhere but the original post has been deleted so here’s a repost of my post in response to someone:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
So sadly we’ll just have to enjoy our fragmented, over-moderated, over-dramatised, sometimes slow, sometimes down, sometimes goes out of money, sometimes the server owners just burn out, little spot until something better is invented
As a general user I have not really seen many calls for donations / volunteering / help requested, I think more people would be willing to pitch in if tangible needs were presented clearly - but maybe I’m alone in my willingness to help.
Browse by All (hot or new, your choice), filter out what you don’t want. Can’t do that on reddit anymore.
Really?! Goodness, I guess it was a good thing I got permabanned there last year. That’s utter shit.
Yeah, I caught wind recently that they eliminated /all.
Exactly. It’s weird to me that anyone doesn’t view posts this way. It’s the default. It shows you everything, and you just block the small number of communities you actively don’t want to see
It does? [email protected] and [email protected] are exactly what you describe. I’m subbed to both, although obviously not everyone is (we can’t force people to read things they don’t want to).
Not sure the point. There’s already big communities that are fairly active that are more targeted. If I felt like looking at memes, why would I go to a general community instead of a meme community. Or if I wanted news or politics, why wouldn’t I go to one of the large news or politics communities over a general one? Megas within specific communities seem like something that’s only used by a few communities that could be used elsewhere (with the drawback of how /all handles them if you don’t sort by new comments or go directly to the comm).
/all already includes content from all communities, so something posted to c/general is just as likely to be missed my me as stuff posted to a new niche comm. But that latter gives me to option to sub, so I’m more likely to see any future content posted over the next several years. And I might even get motivated to add a post or two, which a post in a general comm would never achieve.
I know reddit used to have a “general” reddit.com page at the beginning, but here it is more like world shitpost where people put whatever.
You may or not have seen recent cross-instance dramas, but that is part of the reason why I think it is better to have a fragmented and decentralized set of instances instead of one melting pot, so that it’s not one set of admins calling the shots on behalf of all of Lemmy.
recent cross-instance dramas
Recent? Drama between instances seems like a constant thing since at least the great reddit exodus. Maybe longer, but I wasn’t here before that.
There was one particular drama I have in mind but I knew as I was writing, but people may come back months later and think the same thing. I still kept it that way as it will still ring true regardless of what the next drama will be.
For some reason, every admin of every instance feels the need to have the same communities like everyone else.
Some of that is probably due to defederation and sometimes the gap in the personalities in instances are different enough to warrant communities of the same name on the difference instances regardless of federation status. Of course I’m sure there many many tiny duplicate communities that serve no useful purpose and it would help the UX if they weren’t there.
I go here in those cases https://piefed.world/home/hot/all
Did world defederate? I can’t comment there.
My #1 guess is that it just wasn’t thought out terribly well. It looks a lot like it was meant to be “Reddit, but with federation”. With that mindset, just having each instance be its own minireddit with its own equivalent of subreddits is pretty intuitive, but it turns out to be really clunky once it’s working. (Hard to find communities and content, dozen different but identically named communities, weird federation behavior)
This being said, nothing’s stopping people from making general/chat/hangout communities, it just takes a lot of work to make a place active and discoverable enough, especially since activity is generally low across the board anyway.
