Honest thoughts: I think fractured communities are what’s causing the issue.
You end up with the same post on 5 different instances, each with a fraction of the engagement it would get in one place.
I wonder if some way of federating communities might be a better way, eg, c/photograohy could exist on both lemmy.world and lemm.ee, have submissions and comments from both.
I think the user’s just need to coalesce around a single instance’s community and let the other ones go away. Don’t treat each instance’s version of a community the same. Subscribe to the one that has the most users (or best mods) and let the other ones die.
It’s no different than reddit having multiple subreddits with similar themes. r/xbox vs r/xboxone for instance. If I’m looking to subscribe to one, I will look at the subreddit with the most users and ignore the other one.
This is what I do too, but doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose of the fediverse? Naturally the communities on the largest instances will have the most users. I realize this shouldn’t need to be the case but after several months using lemmy it clearly is the case.
If everything settles down onto 2-3 monolithic instances, aren’t we just back to a slightly worse reddit?
2-3 monolithic instances is probably inevitable for general usage. And also, this is 100% better than a single privately controlled corporation.
There are also niche instances where specific communities may fit better on than the general instances.
And also, if the 2-3 monolithic instances start fucking around, there are plenty of alternate instances we can migrate to.
How long do I wait?
Well, as a Lemmy pioneer, you are a part of the user’s that decides which instance’s community wins. Quit supporting all instance’s versions of the same community. Choose one, and if a different one wins out, switch.
So, as a new user to Lemmy: i have to go and hunt down all the cool communities, not just within my own instance (akin to reddit) but across the fediverse?
That’s some shitty UX. We can do better.
It’s not really all that different.
Please, propose an aternative.
The only annoying part about it (and believe me, it is certainly annoying) is trying to subscribe to a community that no one on your home instance has subscribed to yet. I don’t think I ever got it to work. The UX of that needs to be improved, definitely. But once your instance has at least one person subscribed to a community your instance “knows” about it and it shows up in the search (and “r/all”, not sure what to call it on Lemmy) just like everything else on your instance.
So no, it’s really not all that different except for brand new communities no one on your instance has subscribed to yet.
I think since you are the one who finds it to be shitty UX perhaps you could propose something. And since lemmy is opensource, you can have a look at where the hooks are needed to enable the proposed solution.
Tradeoffs.
If we want the flexibility of not being beholden to a monolith of mods like reddit, then we have to accept the consequence that anyone can create a community anywhere.
It’s not hard to search the fediverse, just takes effort to filter. In fact, the great overwhelming volume we get from it is testament to how much better this is than reddit.
Seems to me you’re tilting at windmills.
At what point would that trade of be not worth it?
Right now in my head, it seems that too many communities are being started, and for most interests there is no clear “winning” community.
Huh?
You’re here aren’t you? I think that says you consider the tradeoffs worth it.
That’s no different than Reddit. You want to follow a hobby on Reddit, you need to find the specific community that is most popular even though there could be thousands.
I think the better solution would be something like collections that dedup or crosspost them - both pics on lemmy.world and lemm.ee could exist in a collection. For that matter, it would solve the fractured communities as well as the “far too niche communities for such a small userbase” issue. Pics collection could include pics, photography, black&whitepics, etc.
(I have no idea technically how this would work or even if it could)
Who would set up, maintain, and police these collections?
Would the end goal be a collection of every c/photography community across the fediverse in one collection? How would you prevent someone from blogspaming their links to every individual community?
As with any technical implementation: The tech side is almost always far easier than trying to come up with a “good” or “right” solution.
Deduping the same post or link is easy. The same image… there are ways. Images modified to look different, that’s where the trouble would start.
I have no idea, i imagine it would be like a multireddit. The initial creator curates it, but the mods of the communities admin. Copies can be made if you don’t like the original collection, or its been abandoned?
I would hope a collection would have a bit more deduping/crossposted logic?
But i could see even having it so you can post to a collection- but before posting, it asks you which community fits best (ranks similar names by subscribers) this way you post to the most popular one. This should naturally make the user base gravitate to one or another.
Couldn’t we do collections within an app on a per-user basis?
Like I could create a collection of different communities that I see as having some commonality, then it’s only a view for me.
But I’m no dev, so take that into consideration.
I might be a dev, but I’m dev enough to understand it’s actually about communication and understanding the problem and not writing code. Writing code is pretty easy by comparison.
I think collections are a good and useful feature on their own merit, I’m not sure if they’ll solve the fragmented communities issue.
If my problem is that a single article is being posted to 5 different photography community, and each with 2 comments, well, now I can see them together, but people are still not talking to each other. Social media platforms live and die by users talking to each other IMO.
Good points/explanation about the fragmentation breaking the communication.
Hmm, not sure if we can take any active position toward “fixing”, since it’s really hard to predict the outcome of our actions. Perhaps this is something that will continue to mature as communities coalesce.
I think I’d still like the ability to build my own in-app filters that aggregate communities. Like you’d do with a podcast app. Then at least (for an individual) you’d see all the posts that you consider related in a single feed/folder/view.
It’s definitely not a simple problem.
I 100% agree with this!
I don’t think this is unpopular. Well, at least I hope it is not. Those bots are horrendous.
Have you tried blocking them?
What seems to be popular is the inability of people to use basic Lemmy functions… not sure if because of UI discoverability, or because they really want some algorithm to feed them clickbait mush.
I have. I actually defederated my instance from lemmit. But many users do not have that option, and user blocking can be tedious if the offending bots are many.
So you could say I am quite aware of Lemmy’s basic functions, yes.
If I’m not mistaken, lemmit has a single bot account, easy for anyone to block… and I haven’t seen anyone else running similar bots.
So what is all this even about?
When I block a bot it crashes the app.
Which app? Seems to work fine for me in Jerboa, Liftoff and Sync. Blocking all bots in Lemmy’s account settings seems to work too.
Memmy for Lemmy iOs at the time. Trying out Avelon now. Still figuring my tweaks.
Fragmented communities are.
My front page has the same thing 10-15 times because they were cross posted to so many different instances.
I’ve reduced my Lemmy usage by probably 95% because of it. I scroll so much but get nowhere.
No matter what my sort options are.
Edit: which aren’t always bots, unfortunately. A ton of people see them from other communities and will post the same thing to theirs. Blocking bots does not help.
Have you considered unsubscribing from the fragments? Dramatically reduce your subs and you’ll have a much better time.
It’s all over my front page. Even the few that I am subscribed to, I kinda need to be because of the fragmentation. There are 3 main Android communities. If I only pick one, I miss news, but if I pick all 3, I get a ton of duplicate news.
Lemmy is flawed. They need to publish an update where Lemmy condenses these posts into one post with a drop down where you can open and choose which instance you want to view it from. Shouldn’t be hard, and to prevent any issues, allow the user to condense a certain time period. For example, allow me to condense all posts that are the same URL that were posted in the past 6 or 24 hours. Make the most popular post the “main” one, and have a drop down to view the other ones.
I know it’s possible because I used to have an extension to check if any URL I was currently on was posted to Reddit, and if it was, show me every single instance of it. It was useful to see exactly where the news article I was viewing was posted on, or the YouTube video, etc.
I had very high hopes for Lemmy, but the fact I’ve been here for a month before the Reddit API changes, I have seen the clusterfuck that Lemmy has become. There’s no way new users are going to even sign up when the front page is repost city.
The way i see it is that it is okay to miss some things. I only sub to one android community (lemdroid), one tech community (lemmy world), one privacy community, etc. I am okay with possibly missing the first post about a thing because of this. It helps a lot. Another thing i do is use thunder to sort by “top today” once a day on the all feed to see what everyone thinks is important.
Unrelated, but I don’t sub to lemdroid because it’s run by the same toxic moderators of the subreddit.
Just thought that might be useful info for anyone who didn’t know.
This works for the individual (as long as they concede to knowing missing content). But if everyone does this it kinda destroys lemmy because you never get the critical mass of users in any one community to have meaningful discussion.
Which highlights the issue of your proposal for me, that I’m not concerned about missing “content” in the form of links. I don’t like missing out on conversations. But when they are fragmented as they are now with so few people in each, discussion ends up quite limited as well. If people just silence one or more “duplicate” communities to reduce the issue of repeat content then it ensures discussions remain fragmented as well.
I think one community becomes the dominate like on reddit and others offshoot due to mod differences, community rules, etc. As an example, i am not sure if anxdroid lemdroid is the largest community, but it is run by the r/android mods and i see no issue with how its run so that is the one i sub to. If i ever began to dislike it i might move to android lemmy ml or something.
Hopefully we see it mature this way, and eventually we some primary communities (per subject), with some smaller communities, and the tiny ones just being subsumed by the others.
As the top mod of one of these Android communities, our comm on LW usually isn’t super heavy on the news front and I feel our content is generally pretty different than the others, and duplicate news posts happens pretty rarely.
To be honest I’ve been a little confused on the various posts just being links back to Reddit. Not sure what the benefit is for the poster?
I think the idea was to get some data into lemmy, to seed it from reddit. Seems to have run its course.
Whenever I see the same person reposting like that, I downvote all but whatever seems the highest voted or post in the most specific community. Reducing such spam is one of the values of the downvote IMO. Though unfortunately depending on where the community is hosted, the downvoting may or may not actually work.
I see it as little different from downvoting someone posting the same comment in a thread. They’re simply not contributing to making the site better and in fact are actively making it worse. I don’t mind a single cross post so that they can use both a smaller community and a bigger, more general one, but take issue when they’re posting to a dozen big communities (especially ones that most people are likely subscribed to anyway). To anyone who does this, I wag my finger at you.
As I understand it, seeing the same post multiple times when it is cross-posted is an app issue. The default desktop UI combines them all into one post with links near the top showing the other communities it was cross-posted to.
I never see the multiple post thing you are talking about.
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Not just Reddit bots… “There is a discussion on [Reddit, Hacker News, etc…] but feel free to comment here as well.” (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Hacker news gets me a lot
Easily the most annoying Lemmy bot at the moment.
Your opinion is not unpopular, everyone wants these dumb repost/article bots that post the same link in 15 communities gone.
Yeah, initially I thought it would be a good idea to kick-start discussion for certain communities, but in practice nobody comments on those posts.
I ended up blocking the bots too.
The reason I personally don’t comment on those bot posts is because there’s no real OP that might be interested in my answer/opinion so I think “Why even bother?”.
Pretty much.
Why do I want to read a bot of AITA on a different site? That really makes no sense to me.
You have the wrong community
Hey, this is supposed to be /unpopularopinion
Seems like it’s filling the same role as r/unpopularopinion perfectly then
If we’re being fair, I’m just parroting the exact same line that gets repeated whenever any unpopularopinion is actually pretty popular.
The unpopular opinion would be: due to having a far lower user base than reddit, bots fill a unique and necessary role on Lemmy that would be a thankless task for an actual user.
I’m witholding judgement, but I do think I’ve seen the same articles posted in several fediverse and it is getting old.
Lol
With you. All these single upvote posts with 0 comments. Ban them!
All new post views are full of them.
To some extent they can be useful
But yeah, I don’t need a one to one of reddit, if I wanted that I’d just be on reddit
Not an unpopular opinion. I don’t want to go to Reddit anymore.
The only thing I’ve noticed is a recent influx of people just shitting on poor people.
yeah! i’ve noticed really toxic shitty discourse lately. i wonder if this is some sort of astroturf? i know that inherently sounds conspiratorial, but it’s genuinely noticeable
I’ve seen it too, as well as propaganda either masquerading as or being so far left that they push pro-authoritarian bs.
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There might be some that are legit, but I suspect there are a ton of brigading trolls. Too many similar sounding comments, like bots on Twitter.
Talked to some knob the other day who was talking about ruling his small business with, and I quote “an iron fist”
Thankfully that’s not a common interaction but I do notice more hostile folks recently.
I think aggressive meme formats is also a big contribution. Unless you block a lot of communities, All is usually just filled with memes. My subscriptions (and I assume any new/casual user’s) are not varied enough yet and I run out of interesting things there. This makes me browse All, but it’s just memes.
I’m blocking a list of communities every day with the same tired wojack memes. I want to be free of this.
Maybe its just me but I havent seen any of them?
The Lemmit.online bot is banned from lemmy.world for all users, which I think is responsible for a lot of the useless bot traffic (useful for people who want to keep up to date on Reddit happenings I suppose). Lemm.ee, Lemmy.ca etc. don’t block the bot site-wide so it’s up to users like OP to block that bot if they don’t want to see it.
That makes a lot of sense then yes
I blocked one user when I first signed up that was doing this. I can’t remember which. But any chance you’ve blocked someone, too? Cause I only remember a single bot being really bad at it.
There’s also some other bot that’s name starts with something like “L4” or something, but it’s good in my book. It only reposts something like the top post and I usually only see its posts actually having discussion. It’s only the spammy bot that made so many zero discussion posts that I have a problem with.
I cant even remember blocking any bot, no. But I see it similarly, if it actually provides good discussion then its fine in my book. I get that we dont want to just rehash reddit but its not like link aggregators dont aggregate from other link aggregators.
I said this was a bad idea when we first moved here. Nobody wants to interact with a bot. Especially if it is a discussion that involves the OP… people realise the conversation is taking place on Reddit and go back there.
