Its not clear to me that the issues I’m identifying can be resolved with a new release. Id love to have the discussion, but it goes deeper than just discovery.
I think the best example of how to ‘lemmy’ properly, or in a way that doesn’t create ‘wasted votes’ (in the gerrymandering sense) of content, is the startrek lemmy. The focus on a niche topic and own it entirely. Theres no point in having lemmy subcommunities based on startrek because the startrek lemmy is so great and makes such great content.
Contrast this with lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, most of the other big instances. Mostly redundant sublemmys. Because of this, the quantity of content is very thin, and because of this, good content is less likely to gather momentum. A way to group sublemmys across instances could work, almost like a kind of sub-federation (like, on lemmy.world, maybe lemmy.ml/c/memes is federated into lemmy.world/c/memes. any content posted to one is ‘considered’ posted to the other). It seems relatively straightforward (not a trivial lift, but reasonably possible) to merge the two RSS feeds.
The same issue exists with discovery. Things are too diffuse in lemmys current network structure.
I’ve gone through some graduate level coursework on network mathematics, and I work with networks in a very different context, but I don’t exactly have the math skill to write out a proof on this. This paper outlines the basic concept, but to extend it to social media, we basically get much much better content in the form of submissions, comments and discussions, with super-connectivity. Its kind of fundamental to social media graphs and there are some clear barriers in lemmys design that prevent it.
A way to group sublemmys across instances could work
I think user side multi-communities whose definitions are easily shareable so that you can basically set up a bunch based on a curator’s or moderator’s recommendations … would do the trick nicely and be pretty achievable technically. Frankly, I feel they’ve been a long time coming and hope that they’re in the works already.
it’ll probably happen in stages, with it first just being a list of communities, then maybe they can get a name and be shared with multiple users and you could follow them like a normal community
I don’t see any reason it would require a rewrite, currently a community is an Actor that Boosts the posts directed to it, a multi-community could also be an Actor that boosts any posts going into the communities/Actors that it follows
I think the best example of how to ‘lemmy’ properly, or in a way that doesn’t create ‘wasted votes’ (in the gerrymandering sense) of content, is the startrek lemmy. The focus on a niche topic and own it entirely. Theres no point in having lemmy subcommunities based on startrek because the startrek lemmy is so great and makes such great content.
I found this paragraph pretty confusing, probably because of uncommon terminology.
With “the startrek lemmy” you refer to one specific instance? Which? ‘Lemmy’ is commonly used to refer to the platform, or the software.
“lemmy subcommunities” refers to communities? Like https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse? Later you use the word “sublemmys”. Does that refer to the same thing, a community?
Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.
Another line of division is the bot question. Are bots allowed to make new posts? Are bots allowed to make new comments?
What’s the moderation style?
People are diverse. A one-size-fits-all-solution will likely leave some demands unsatisfied. If that portion is big enough, it justifies redundant communities. And there are many more reasons to possibly see redundancy as a good thing.
People who like a centralized approach can flock to the biggest instance or community, and others can do their thing. Both can coexist. What would be nice to have is view-grouping of communities, from the reader’s perspective.
startrek.website was started during the exodus from former members of the startrek subreddits. All the communities (afaik) there are focused on startrek in some way. They post some great content.
The concept of ‘wasted votes’ in gerrymandering is when you can pack voters into specific districts based on voting demographics and population, to make it such that you can manipulate the outcomes of elections, or make districts that wouldn’t be competitive based on the population, competitive for one specific party. Its a kind of efficiency measure of an election. It has a corollary in these threaded style communities, where if engagement isn’t rewarded (be it upvoted, commented on, or submitted), the reward cycle doesn’t happen and no additional content or engagement is created. In these communities the wasted vote concept applies because now engagement is spread out over redundant posts, comments, and lemmys. If you have two threads representing effectively the same thing at the same time, that could be considered a wasted vote, because now engagement is split.
And yes, I’ve been using sublemmys and communities interchangeably. I don’t know that a common parlance has evolved yet. There have been a couple threads discussing this.
Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.
I think this is a great point and I see why its warranted. There is another argument further down that’s similar to yours.
Its not clear to me that the issues I’m identifying can be resolved with a new release. Id love to have the discussion, but it goes deeper than just discovery.
I think the best example of how to ‘lemmy’ properly, or in a way that doesn’t create ‘wasted votes’ (in the gerrymandering sense) of content, is the startrek lemmy. The focus on a niche topic and own it entirely. Theres no point in having lemmy subcommunities based on startrek because the startrek lemmy is so great and makes such great content.
Contrast this with lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, most of the other big instances. Mostly redundant sublemmys. Because of this, the quantity of content is very thin, and because of this, good content is less likely to gather momentum. A way to group sublemmys across instances could work, almost like a kind of sub-federation (like, on lemmy.world, maybe lemmy.ml/c/memes is federated into lemmy.world/c/memes. any content posted to one is ‘considered’ posted to the other). It seems relatively straightforward (not a trivial lift, but reasonably possible) to merge the two RSS feeds.
The same issue exists with discovery. Things are too diffuse in lemmys current network structure.
I’ve gone through some graduate level coursework on network mathematics, and I work with networks in a very different context, but I don’t exactly have the math skill to write out a proof on this. This paper outlines the basic concept, but to extend it to social media, we basically get much much better content in the form of submissions, comments and discussions, with super-connectivity. Its kind of fundamental to social media graphs and there are some clear barriers in lemmys design that prevent it.
I think user side multi-communities whose definitions are easily shareable so that you can basically set up a bunch based on a curator’s or moderator’s recommendations … would do the trick nicely and be pretty achievable technically. Frankly, I feel they’ve been a long time coming and hope that they’re in the works already.
there’s a github issue for this
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
it’ll probably happen in stages, with it first just being a list of communities, then maybe they can get a name and be shared with multiple users and you could follow them like a normal community
I don’t see any reason it would require a rewrite, currently a community is an Actor that Boosts the posts directed to it, a multi-community could also be an Actor that boosts any posts going into the communities/Actors that it follows
I found this paragraph pretty confusing, probably because of uncommon terminology.
With “the startrek lemmy” you refer to one specific instance? Which? ‘Lemmy’ is commonly used to refer to the platform, or the software.
“lemmy subcommunities” refers to communities? Like https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse? Later you use the word “sublemmys”. Does that refer to the same thing, a community?
Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.
Another line of division is the bot question. Are bots allowed to make new posts? Are bots allowed to make new comments?
What’s the moderation style?
People are diverse. A one-size-fits-all-solution will likely leave some demands unsatisfied. If that portion is big enough, it justifies redundant communities. And there are many more reasons to possibly see redundancy as a good thing.
People who like a centralized approach can flock to the biggest instance or community, and others can do their thing. Both can coexist. What would be nice to have is view-grouping of communities, from the reader’s perspective.
startrek.website was started during the exodus from former members of the startrek subreddits. All the communities (afaik) there are focused on startrek in some way. They post some great content.
The concept of ‘wasted votes’ in gerrymandering is when you can pack voters into specific districts based on voting demographics and population, to make it such that you can manipulate the outcomes of elections, or make districts that wouldn’t be competitive based on the population, competitive for one specific party. Its a kind of efficiency measure of an election. It has a corollary in these threaded style communities, where if engagement isn’t rewarded (be it upvoted, commented on, or submitted), the reward cycle doesn’t happen and no additional content or engagement is created. In these communities the wasted vote concept applies because now engagement is spread out over redundant posts, comments, and lemmys. If you have two threads representing effectively the same thing at the same time, that could be considered a wasted vote, because now engagement is split.
And yes, I’ve been using sublemmys and communities interchangeably. I don’t know that a common parlance has evolved yet. There have been a couple threads discussing this.
I think this is a great point and I see why its warranted. There is another argument further down that’s similar to yours.
These things absolutely can be fixed in an update but I think we both know the devs have no intention of going in that direction.