What is the best way to make sense of the alternative federated communities?

It's a little daunting to me that in some cases there are 2 or more communities between the federated alternatives; what's the best way to corral these? I had thought I could perhaps subscribe to Lemmy instances on kbin; is that correct? If so, how? Thank you in advance.

Edit: Well, this is sort of embarrassing but when I was searching for the other communities, I was accidentally searching threads instead of magazines and of course not finding anything so that's the answer as to HOW to subscribe [when it comes to kbin]. My point stands, though, that having so many communities is a bit cumbersome. I guess I will let it percolate a bit and see how it feels.

Kichae,

So, back 15 years ago or so, most people who wanted to discuss topics on the internet, and who didn't want that discussion to be ephemeral, found forums dedicated to those topics.

There were thousands of forums. Millions of them. Some had dozens of users, while others had 10s of thousands. Many of them discussed similar topics.

Browning Lemmy or kbin is like browsing thousands and thousands of subforums across dozens of websites. Some of those websites have similar subforums, but they might be populated by very different people having very different customs and discussions.

Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

You know, toxic shit.

The best thing to do with multiple communities here is find one that you like best, and engage with it. If there's something actually interesting going on in one of the other ones, trust someone to cross-post it. Some of these communities may not take root and grow, but some will, and they'll each take on their own flavour, and serve their members, not the machine.

grizzly_dw,
grizzly_dw avatar

Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

This is so true. Not only the promotion of toxic behavior but also just the shouting into the void part.

I used to play EverQuest back in the day, and I frequented probably dozens of forums at the time. My guild had one, there was one that somebody set up for the server I played on, there were forums for all the different classes, unofficial pre-wiki forums (anyone remember AllahKhazam?), and of course the official forums on the EQ website.

Your comment just brought back a bunch of memories from those days. After using Reddit for so long, I had kind of forgotten what it was like back then. The biggest difference between then and now, I think, was how much more personal it was.

Of course, everyone on my guild forum knew each other because we all played together. But even on the server-wide forum that had a few thousand people, you saw a lot of the same names over and over again in different threads each day. It made it a lot easier to remember the person on the other side of the screen, rather than just a username. You'd actually get to know people, to an extent.

We celebrated birthdays and new jobs. We knew when someone had a death in the family. There were friendships, and even long-distance romances that happened in the game/forums. And drama, of course. There were always the loudmouths who liked to argue with everyone, but everyone else already knew that, so when the loudmouth tried to start something people would just say, "Oh shut up, So-and-so. No one wants to fight with you." Sometimes people would leave our guild to join one of the bigger guilds on the server, and it was legitimately heartbreaking.

It really felt like an honest-to-God community, rather than a bunch of anonymous commenters who happened to be talking about the same thing. Even in the smaller, more niche subreddits, I never got that feeling. Maybe that's on me for just habit-scrolling most of the time and not engaging. But I really do think that the sheer volume of people on a platform makes it difficult to form real communities.

I don't know if the federated structure will help to bring that back or not. But I agree that the "fractured" nature that some reddit refugees seem to worry about is likely more of a blessing in disguise.

ripcord,
ripcord avatar

I really wish there was a save feature, this is a great take I want to remember when people ask something similar later.

therealpygon, (edited )

This is the sort of echo-chamber romanticism you can expect in miniature silos. Fostering meaningful heartfelt individual conversations, person-to-person relationships, and small communities was never the intention. Its first-order focus has always been about a singular aggregated place for links on topics of interest, voted on by the followers of a tag/community, and sometimes spawning interesting discussions about those links in a peer-voted manner. Kbin and lemmy are both "aggregators", like Reddit, not "social networks" or "forums". [Edit: ability is not the same as intention]

Subscribing to hundreds of forums and RSS feeds with slightly different foci just to try to find the actual interesting stories, in most peoples opinions given Reddit and Diggs success, was decidedly not the "best" experience.

No one is preventing you from using things how you want, to seek our miniature echo-chambers so that your personal voice can be louder, but it is hardly the appropriate response to espouse how "great" microcosms are when someone is asking about how to better aggregate in a... checks notes... a "content aggregation" system.

Kichae, (edited )

Fascinating that you feel like having discussions with orher people is tantamount to being in an echo chamber.

Here's the thing, Lemmy isn't a content aggregator. Lemmy-UI is, but Lemmy-UI is not the only front end to Lemmy. LemmyBB also exists, and it gives you a front end that looks like a phpBB forum. The API also let's people make other front ends, to suggest other uses as well.

Lemmy is just an ActivityPub user and group manager. There are lots of AP groups out there. Friendica, which looks like Facebook, uses them for their "forums" , and you can follow Friendica forums from Lemmy. Importantly, you can also follow Lemmy communities from Friendica, where they're indistinguishable from a Friendica forum. You can also follow chirp.social and a.gu.pe groups on here, which are third party groups for Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogs. They're full of people just having microblogs discussion threads, without titles and everything.

Lemmy is however we use it. It's all just Fediverse down here. But if all you want is to aggregate links, what do you need comments and non-linking posts for? Just use Pocket.

grizzly_dw, (edited )
grizzly_dw avatar

I like how you stated that big platforms like Reddit encourage toxic behavior such as performative antagonism and biting sarcasm, and then someone immediately shows up to defend big platforms by using performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.

therealpygon,

I'm quite glad that you find missing the entire point fascinating.

Yes, I concede that you're right. You can certainly use lemmy/kbin only as a forum. You could certainly use Reddit as your "chat" platform too.

My entire point was that this person asked a question about trying to aggregate content; your toxic response was instead to talk about how terrible wanting that is and that they should just not want the thing that they were happy with. This is the type of high-quality "discussions" one can expect to bubble to the top in these silos.

Kichae, (edited )

Oh, if that was your point, then maybe you should have actually, I don't know, articulated it instead of waxing bitterly about "echo chambers" like someone who's never attended a party where they haven't been asked to leave.

An active community with a manageable number of people in it won't actually surface less content, it will just bury less of it, because people are only able to take in so much at a time. The only things a larger number of smaller communities does is make you aware of how much you might actually miss in a large, monolithic space.

That's not feeling a loss of meaningful content aggregation, that's just FOMO.

And you know, reading the top 10 posts in a subreddit that gets thousands of them a day doesn't make you well informed, and being the person in the room everyone else regrets meeting doesn't make you intelligent. Being a chronic assholes only correlates with being unhappy.

At the end of the day, social media is entertainment and socialization, not education. If you want to actually be informed about shit, go back to college and start reading academic and trade journals.

Madison_rogue,
Madison_rogue avatar

This was one of the communities I came from, a Star Wars fan site Blueharvest.net. I was a moderator for a couple sections of its forum back in its waning days. The site admin devoted a lot of time and energy to the project (amazing person...love her to death), and eventually as people began to migrate to Facebook she decided to close the website's door.

Still miss that place a lot. I made some lasting friendships there because we were a very tight-knit community of about 100-150 active users.

JonEFive,

I'm really curious to see if we start to see separate instances dedicated to separate topics like that. Imagine that forum you used to participate in on its own instance with all the same subforums/categories. The difference now is that you can federate that niche forum with the wider fediverse if you want to engage with a larger audience.

People are used to that singular reddit feel. I never started new posts on reddit because I would rarely get a response. If nobody catches your post in the new section of a semi-popular sub within an hour or so, it's gone. Or on a large sub, I had a post removed for being too similar to other posts even though a search didn't yield any results. When I asked which post it was similar to, I get a snarky comment from a power tripping mod about "not being a librarian" and muted for a week so that I can't respond as punishment for daring to question them. Come to think of it, reddit is kind of a shitty place with the exception of a few niche subs.

Now, I'm feeling much more inclined to start new threads since I feel I'd actually be able to have a conversation here.

sparseMatrix,
sparseMatrix avatar

I'm sure my fellow commentors have made good work of answering this question, but I wanted to offer my perspective as well.

The big thing to understand is, perception of a thing is about focus and direction. If you consider the communities to be consumers of content delivered according to a protocol, That protocol affords subscription services, and means of posting. Much of the rest of it is just security (where do you log in and post from?) and consumption format - all these services have enough in common that the content can be moved around among them without too much hassle about the storage and communications format, and the display format is 90% of the difference between e.g., kbin and mastodon.

As it turns out, the walled garden people had to work hard to make those gardens walled, and to keep them that way. The evolution of communications systems favors this kind of unrestricted exchange of information and bespoke methods of presentation for consumption.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, these new communications methodologies do not readily lend themselves to converting private persons and their self expression into corporate mass market products.

Brkdncr,

I found it easiest to not think about it.

Brkdncr,

I found it easiest to not think about it.

Spzi,

The good thing about redundancies is, they make the system more resilient.

If everybody flocks to one singular community/magazine for a topic, and the instance hosting that c/m decides to defederate your home instance (or vice versa), you're cut off.

When that's just one of many c/ms, it's less of a loss.

ppb1701,
ppb1701 avatar

It's sort of like the old school forums of yesteryear. On the ones you are interested in I'd suggest browsing them to see if you like them or if you just wanna jump in subscribe to several and see if you like one or more of them. Any you don't feel like you are meshing with you can unsubscribe and they wont show up unless you go for viewing everything federated/local (if more than one on that instance).

Grimlo9ic,
Grimlo9ic avatar

The migration caused a large jump in the amount of users, and with that you will have disorder and confusion.

But in time, the communities/magazines where people actually congregate in will rise to the top of the lists. That's where you can find the most active discussions. Even now I found myself unsubbing from some of the quiet kbin magazines I found on my first day and subbing to the bigger communities on beehaw and lemmy instead, which works for me because I want that feel.

The beauty of duplicates is if you find that you're being drowned out, you can go to a place where you can have more of a voice, and discussions will be slower paced, or you can start your own. Most people crave simplicity though so realize that not every alternative will be alive; some of them are veritable ghost towns.

With regards to kbin.social itself, I like that it's relatively open and neutral, instead giving users the access to block users/magazines/communities/whole instances as they see fit. As far as I know it hasn't been deferedated by other instances yet, and that's great because you can reach most anything in the Fediverse.

Maestro,
Maestro avatar

I'm not sure subbing to beehaw communities is smart right now. You have a kbin.social account and beehaw is still federated with kbin, but beehaw defederated a bunch of other large instances because they have open signup. Kbin has open signup too, so it's only a matter of time before they defeferate kbin too

btaf45,

I am staying away from beehaw for that very reason. I regard them as a local bbs.

Grimlo9ic,
Grimlo9ic avatar

If it comes to that, they're well within their rights to. At the moment I'm at 152 subscriptions to different places on the Fediverse, which are close analogs/outright migrations of the same subreddits I once browsed. Only 10 of those are on beehaw, so if I get cut off from those, I'll go elsewhere.

exscape,
exscape avatar

Strictly speaking they defederated due to spam issues, not open signups. (But yes, the open signups made it easier for spammers, so it was an indirect cause.)
They've also stated they intend to re-federate when there are better moderation tools available, so I wouldn't expect Beehaw to end up entirely isolated in the future.

WTFisthisOMGreally,
WTFisthisOMGreally avatar

It’s worth the effort to get over the learning curve. I’m in the same boat as you, but I’m starting to wrap my brain around how it works.

SwingingKoala,
@SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Dunno, I like that the same community can exist in multiple places. As the system is federated I can subscribe to all and read all content and contribute everywhere. Not sure yet how crossposting will affect my feed though.

kavides,
kavides avatar

That's one of the main things I'm wondering about as well.

Guadin,
@Guadin@k.fe.derate.me avatar

At the moment it's a bit complicated. If a magazine is not yet federated to your instance, it won't show up. Not a big problem on large instances (someone has probably "added" it already), but it can be on smaller ones. You could use browse.feddit.de to look for magazines and then use the "location" (e.g. @magazine) in the search.bar on your instance. That will federate the magazine to your instance.

KoboldCoterie, (edited )
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have multiple communities for the same topic. Cross-posting content is much cleaner on Lemmy / kbin than on Reddit; if you're subscribed to multiple communities and something is cross-posted between them, it will only show up in your feed once, so you can safely cross-post to your heart's delight without worrying about spamming people.

Having multiple communities gives people options. Maybe one of them will eventually establish itself as the authority on that topic, where people congregate - and that's fine, but even if not, having alternatives means that if something happens to one of them - the instance shuts down, for example, or even just has an outage, or the mods decide to go crazy and start changing the rules or banning people, or an instance defederates, everyone can just adjust their attention to one of the other alternatives. Compare this to Reddit where when users of a given sub disagree with moderator decisions, they have no real recourse but to try and rally under a new sub with no real reach.

Edit: To add to this, if you cross-post something, it shows (on every community you post to) which other communities it was cross-posted to, so this can be a useful way to inform people reading from one community that the other communities exist, so they can subscribe to them, too, if they want to.

shishmish,
shishmish avatar

I used this to find where my Reddit subs went and how to find them again on here and lemmy (and squabble and mastodon and shitjustworks......gods I feel like a rabbit on speed ,so many tabs open, so many instances...)
oh sorry as I was saying this is helpful: https://sub.rehab/?searchTerm=&visibleServices=lemmy&visibleServices=kbin&visibleServices=misc&visibleServices=matrix&officialOnly=false&newOnly=false

KoboldCoterie,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

Ooh, this is awesome! Thanks for the link!

kavides,
kavides avatar

Thanks for the link!

IntergalacticTowel,
@IntergalacticTowel@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I'm hoping for some kind of "multi-reddit" style system that lets us combine the communities from different instances.

Friend,
Friend avatar

Since it's the Fediverse they could be called something like constellations :)

btaf45,

I'm hoping for some kind of "multi-reddit" style system that lets us combine the communities from different instances.

Usenet is another decentralized discussion network like fedverse, but in which all discussion groups from every server are automatically merged together so for users it doesn't even feel decentralized. Most groups have a moderated and a non-moderated version.

mizu6079,

You can try searching here.

mem_somerville_kbin,
mem_somerville_kbin avatar

Yeah, I ran into this the other day. I started m/Skeptic because it didn't exist. Later I found m/Skeptics. And then there was another one, I forget now what that was.

Maybe some of us can merge as we proceed and find our people? But maybe having a couple isn't the worst thing, if they have some differences.

Trekman10,
@Trekman10@sh.itjust.works avatar

That's what I've been hoping will happen - it would be cool for networks to pop up too like how there were for some subreddits.

Also, if they ever add lists they could work like a "multireddit" to corral all the same type of community into one feed at least on the user-end.

Spzi,

if they ever add lists they could work like a “multireddit” to corral all the same type of community into one feed at least on the user-end.

There is issue : Support for grouping communities / multi-communities

Quoting from this statement of the devs:

we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.

Trekman10,
@Trekman10@sh.itjust.works avatar

Hopefully someone with the know-how who's joined up recently will join up cause I don't know the first thing about it.

Any way to see what actual stuff they're working on currently?

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