Sibling communities: A middle way (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by fresh@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3508135

There's been an ongoing debate about whether communities should combine or stay separate. Both have significant disadvantages and advantages:

Combine:

Network effects. Smaller communities become viable if they pool together their userbase. Communities with more people (up to a point!) are generally more useful and fun.

Discoverability. Right now, I might stumble on a 50 subscriber community and not realize everyone has abandoned it for the lively 500 subscriber community somewhere else, maybe with a totally different name.

Separate:

Redundancy. If a community goes down, or an instance is taken down, people can easily move over.

Diffusion of political power. Users can choose a different community or instance if the current one doesn't suit them. Mods are less likely to get drunk on power if they have real competition.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but I just want to show that each side has significant advantages over the other.

Sibling communities:

To have some of the advantages of both approaches, how about we have official "sibling communities"? For example, sign up for fediverse@lemmy.world and, along the top, it lists fediverse@lemmy.ml as a sibling community.

When you post, you have an easily accessible option to cross-post automatically to all sibling communities. You can also set it so that only the main post allows comments, to aggregate all comments to just one post, if that's desirable.

The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you're subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a "cross-sibling post" designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.

Both mod teams must agree to become siblings, so it can't be forced on any community.

Mods of either community can also decide to suppress the cross post if they feel it's too spammy or not suitable for cross discussion.

This allows you to easily learn about all related communities without abandoning your current one. This increases the network effects without needing to combine or destroy communities.

Of course, this could be more informal with just a norm to sticky a post at the top of every community to link to related communities. At least that way I know of the existence of other communities. I personally prefer the official designation so that various technologies can be implemented in the ways I mentioned.

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[-] sirfancy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wish apps would hide duplicate posts. People that crosspost everything results in my feed having double everything because I subscribe to both. It's super annoying, and I'm tempted to leave one of them, but I don't want to miss anything because they're comparable in size.

[-] fresh@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

I agree. I hesitated to cross-post this, but someone suggested I do so on the original post.

But that shows a structural problem with the user incentives on Lemmy. The norm of discouraging cross-posting itself means that we have a system that actively discourages people from connecting with others. And if we're actively incentivized to unsubscribe from multiple similar communities, that's even worse! These are the opposite of the sort of incentives we should have in a healthy and viable social network.

[-] fmu@geddit.social 0 points 1 year ago

People often did similar things on adjacent subs (grilling, bbq, smoking).

It was annoying because I had them all in a single multi, but generally, only up voted or commented on the one that was already most active.

For that reason, I never cross post... I find it annoying, so I don't inflict it on others...

Though, now that I think about it, posting in one community, watching for traction, then if it doesn't pick up, cross posting a couple days later wouldn't be horrible.

[-] fresh@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Ok I get the message. I will refrain from cross posting as much as possible in the future. I do think this is not like Reddit and this tendency is a self-own for Lemmy where there is much more balkanization by design.

[-] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 7 points 1 year ago

The technical solution I would prefer would be something more like communities set up like hashtags on mastodon. You could set up a community in the way that it's set up now, or you could set up a global community where every individual instance can subscribe to the posts that are marked for a certain topic, and it would be a distributed community where no one instance has all the political power, and if any instance goes down then the rest of the instances just continue on.

[-] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How does moderation work in this scenario? Does it fall to instance admins to moderate, and defederate/ban anyone who is causing problems for the global community? That seems like it would amplify the moderation burden significantly

[-] fresh@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

That's an interesting proposal. I think I need to understand it better. Could you describe to me in what ways this would be better?

[-] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 points 1 year ago

With the way things are set up right now, a community is centered on a server. This means that if that server goes down, your community disappears. If someone else creates the same community elsewhere, the community is split. If you're on server A and community is on server B but you're defederates then you can't participate at all, even if person on server C would be ok with you participating.

If the community was a Commons then no single server going down could eliminate the community. Individual servers could have mods for their portion of the community so each local community would have control over what they see and if the local community trusts other local community mods then that could be outsourced. Regardless, servers can get what they want to see -- gaming at exploding-heads and gaming at hexbear could coexist in a superimposed state, and servers that are kosher with both extremes would see everything, servers that are kosher with one extreme or the other would see what they're comfortable with, and servers not comfortable with either extreme could see nothing from either while still having a unified community regardless.

This sort of decentralization is why the broader fediverse works well. Lemmy as it currently operates isn't really decentralized since the majority of the power is aggregated into a limited number of servers who have the popular communities.

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Very good point

[-] PlexSheep@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

I really like your concept, sounds perfect.

The only thing to consider is that Lemmy does not exist in vacuum. Making the sibling system compatible with other Activity Pub systems would be useful.

[-] fresh@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Good point. I'm not as familiar with other Activity Pub interfaces so I haven't thought about the implications for Mastodon, etc.

[-] cerevant@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Why are people obsessed with communities having the same domain name as their login? How do you expect these communities to deal with moderation and admin policies?

Here are some ideas for solutions to the real issues:

Add smart cross posting like on Reddit where interacting with a cross post happens on the community where it was created.
Develop mesh federation instead of a star topography. There would still only be one community with a unique name, but instances could share changes between each other, not just with the host.
Provide a true cross instance community search that is integrated in the primary UI. It would need to provide better metrics for like-named communities so that users can make an informed choice.
Admins need to stop land-grab communities. There needs to be a commitment to moderating, maintaining and growing the community. They could start by purging Reddit general interest knock-offs with fewer than 10 subscribers.
Add support for instance relative links not only to communities, but comments and posts.

In general, I think user focused instances should be separate from community focused instances, but that’s a different rant