Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
Communities can also look like they have the same topic on the surface level, but be completely different when in the context of their own instances. The obvious example is “news” or “politics” or other “real world things” communities on separate country-focused instances, but also “news” on an art instance could be dedicated to “art news” or “writing news” in a writing specific instance.
Or the distinction could be more subtle, like a tech community on slrpnk could focus towards more eco-friendly viewpoints to news about tech compared to a general purpose instance’s tech community. Or Beehaw, for example, seems to lean on more “serious” talk and discussion (or I imagine it would given it’s history, I avoid visiting too news-heavy communities due to vaguely gestures at everything) compared to, say, .world which really seems to embody Reddit’s free-for-all vibe.
Good point, thanks for spelling it out. I was only vaguely aware of what you just described.
That seems to be something unique, tied to the federated structure. Could be confusing for people coming from monolithic platforms. They may not realize what they are seeing.