Is there a way to create Super Communities?

I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.

A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?

B: I think this is the best solution, could a 'super community' method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?

zinklog,

For this to happen every single instance will have to fetch every community from every instance to aggregate posts and make sure new similar community is added which isn't feasible (I think).

Give it some time, and I think organically 1-2 most popular communities will emerge for each specific topic and people will then just subscribe to those ones.

Vildravn,
Vildravn avatar

Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of federation if the communities will live largely on the most popular instances?

ParkingPsychology,

Keep in mind that even on reddit it doesn't work like that. For anything popular you generally end up with 2 or 3 large subs and then a smattering of smaller spin offs/specializations.

So here it's basically the same, except that you end up with several with the exact same name on multiple servers. They don't have to be on popular instances and there will likely be a number of specialized instances around a specific topic.

effingjoe,

Give it some time, and I think organically 1-2 most popular communities will emerge for each specific topic and people will then just subscribe to those ones.

This is kind of what I was thinking, too. There's no limit to how many duplicate subs there can be on Reddit but that didn't stop people from eventually finding the "main" subs. Lemmy just needs a critical mass of users first, so that the clear winners are easily seen. With numbers being so low right now, there's no clear winner among duplicates.

DarkThoughts,

I had the same thought here: https://kbin.social/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/9828/uhhh-what-do-I-call-the-subreddits#entry-comment-42869

B sounds like a sensible solution to the issue, but maybe not so much in a thing that communities "join", but rather "connect" to. The former sounds like a centralized thing that has to be hosted somewhere, the latter being something that exists purely through the communities that are part of it. However, I suspect this needs to be a feature within the actual fediverse type protocol that all those instances (including Mastodon) use, to make this an actual possibility.

PotjiePig,

Maybe using tags? A community can tag itself in areas it wants to both be included in and excluded from. And allow users to surf tag feeds to comment and upvote on, also allow us to organise our communities within groups in our own way?

CynAq,
CynAq avatar

I had the same idea. Tags are already there to gather posts related to a topic in a single page. The difference in experience would be the curation reddit's subreddit system allows. Curation and moderation. Otherwise, an agreed upon tagging scheme should do the trick if the only concern is subscribing to topics.

courts,
courts avatar

I think just being able in my client to "aggregate" different communities/magazines (I'm writing this from kbin) would be great. Like multireddits. This way, everyone can decide for themselves what smaller communities they want to subscribe to. I think neither Lemmy's clients nor kbin support this right now, unfortunately.

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

So what should be easier now is finding those communities/magazines, maybe on a post of one of these communities with links to the other ones

Syo,
Syo avatar

I think you can subscribe to individual magazines on kbin, then just show your subscribed magazines. This means you still have to subscribe to multiple communities. Eventually, it should settle with better modded ones reaching critical mass after some time. Everything is in flux right now, what you're looking for is better done when communities are stable.

courts,
courts avatar

Yes, that works of course. What I like to do is look at a specific topic when I want to. Let's say, I'm in the mood to only check out literature/book related stuff. I'd like to open my "Multimagazine" (I saw someone call it a rack, which I think is a nice analogy) where I only see posts that belong to this topic.

Syo,
Syo avatar

The only thing that's a bit painful now is finding narrow topics. Reddit had grown so big, you can almost guarantee to look for niche topics. On here, you're better asking /m/random.

In a year or so, if fediverse can grow nicely, maybe we'll be asking top level instance to recommend the best community, and rebuild your niche collection.

DrQuint,

This is what I want. A way for users to create their own "lists" similar to multireddits, which come up on their feeds as part of a super-community, and then they can share that list with other users.

No hassle for the moderators. No change to the system outside of the feature's own self-contained stuff.

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

There is no problem if there are more communities with the same topic. The ones wich are better moderated and actively updated will eventually gain in popularity and stand out

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Could potentially be hundreds though, and puts a lot of work on users to look around for the best one -> most likely the communities in bigger instances will win out.

Kichae,

Yeah. There used to be a hundred thousand Dragonball forums out there, and it was never a problem. We should be ok with it not being a problem again.

The fomo over he idea that someone said sornthing somewhere about a thing I care about and I might not be seeing it is one of the worst things big social has given us.

arkcom,
arkcom avatar

I've mentioned this elsewhere but it could just be a UI thing handled by/for each user, that way moderation and control will stay where they are

Basically I could make a group of communities/magazines, for example
selfhosted@kbin.social
selfhost@lemmy.ml
selfhosted@lemmy.world
selfhosting@chirp.social
selfhosted@lemmy.ml
selfhosting@slrpnk.net

For browsing, up/downvoting, and commenting it could be totally transparent. When you want to make your own thread it could just have you select the specific magazine/community from a drop down.

This wouldn't fix the problem of seeing multiple duplicate posts from each.

png,
png avatar

I think this is the ideal solution, but you should be able to share the groups you create with others, exactly like multireddits. That way, collections of these groups could be made available to others, for them to add to their feed.

focus,

There absolutely needs to be a good way of finding communities here on lemmy, that would probably mitigate the problem a bit. I also like your sticky solution linking to similar communities, but it would be great if this happened automatically (or semiautomatically) when creating communities. As in: oh you are trying to create a "technology" community on your instance? Did you have a look at these ones with the same name on federated instances?

kjetil,

There is the Lemmy Community Browser which lets you find almost any community across most(all?) instances

Kichae, (edited )

The thing is, each Lemmy instance is independent of each other, and new instances do not start off knowing that any others exist. Similarly, existing instances do not know that new ones exist. There's no central registry that everything passes through, and it wouldn't be decentralized if there was.

itadakimasu,

Have my upvote. Without such an ability, I fear fragmentation of communities will be a fatal flaw holding back Lemmy's success

Kris,

Isn't that the whole point of Lemmy? So there's no community that's too big to fail?

itadakimasu,

not the whole point, imo

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Ideally you'd want 3-4, but 300.

aqua_synonym,

That's exactly what I thought of. Here's my proposal (though I don't know if this can be implemented in the technology or if it would be compatible with ActivityPub):

Suppose we have two similar communities (i.e., north.pole and north.star, but they both tackle northness but in different instances). The mod from either communities would send an invite to the other to form a "group" or "federate" or "ally". Now, if the other mod approves, here's what happens:

Whenever you post something in a community that has a group, it would be synced with the communities in other instances that are allied to it, including upvotes, comments, and other metrics. So if I post in north.pole, people in north.star could see my post too because we're in an "alliance" and vice versa. They can also upvote my post and I can upvote theirs. There would just be a sign (probably a flair-like design) that would tell users in other instances from which instance the post came from.

With regards to moderation, here's how: they are basically separate communities with content syncing between them. Suppose a user in north.star posts something offensive and against north.pole community rules. The mods in north.pole can block that post from appearing in the north.pole feed.

And here's an unrelated gripe: there should be an instance-standard "ouster poll" for communities that are dead. With what I see right now in the influx of Lemmy users, many communities are dead and users are willing to revive them but they can't because the moderators of those communities are already inactive and redundancy is a pain in "advertising" membership in Lemmy already. There should be like a poll of interested users where they would agree to "oust" the inactive mod (of course there's also a qualification for "inactive") and replace them with probably a democratically "elected" moderator.

tetris11,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

I don't like the idea of a voting system for mods, as it can be gamed very easily by bot accounts. Democracy is sadly under threat due to AI, and so I think the wall-gardened approach might be necessary: users choose an instance of north that suits them, and if the mod is a dick, then those users let the mods of the other north instances (under that super community) know, and the mods of other instances make the decision.

Rentlar,

I was thinking the idea of hashtags at the community and/or post level could be an idea. That way it could aggregate the various communities on instances under one umbrella. E.g. https://lemmy.ml/#gaming could bring up every federated and indexed community tagged gaming. A community such as the pokemon one on lemmy.ml could have tags and in order to appear both at the superset of gaming as well as connect with other pokemon related subs if there was pokemonGo or pokemonTCG.

It would likely require an update of lemmy system itself, I'd have to spend a lot of time with the code to get an idea of how to implement it.

Kris,

This is how it's done on mastodon

VerifiablyMrWonka,
VerifiablyMrWonka avatar

This is something KBin is doing already. Communities can have hashtags attached that show under a communities (magazines) microblog space.

synthllama,

I also think option B is a good idea. It could split up the load of a large topic.

As for maintaining the distributed philosophy of Lemmy, I think it could possibly work by moderators of each community vote on/approve other members of a super community, like and alliance or union. They may want to agree on a standard set of rules. Then if you subscribe to one, it can pick up the others automatically. And if a community/moderators go rogue then the members of the super community moderators could vote to expel that community.

This keeps it still mostly simple/automatic for most users while allowing for a decentralized way to group communities and handle bad actors.

Not sure how feasible it is on the technical side or how it would fit into ActivityPub. But hopefully we find some solution to these fractured communities.

computerboss,

I was wondering the same thing. This is one of those double edge features. On the positive side if a community moderator is no good, or an instance is getting too big, there is the simple option to just make a new community on a different instance. The downside is having a bunch of duplicate small communities is not always a better option than one big centralized one.

I like the idea of super communities, but I am not sure that is even possible with the fediverse/lemmy. There might be some way to do this manually with instances dedicated to a certain topic, but that seems like it would be overkill. Also it would be interesting to see who would end up responsible for moderating the super community.

FirstWizardZorander,

Maybe an option would be to have a virtual "parent" community, or a community group that communities can join. For example, the supercommunity "memes" could contain meme communities on different instances, aggregating posts and comments when queried. Posting would only be possible to a given community though.

This brings an issue with moderation however. If a participating community would be taken over and used to post spam, there would be no clear mechanism to exclude that community from the parent community. Perhaps it would be better if these parent communities where user curated, so the creator would add one or more communities to the parent, allowing other users to subscribe/unsubscribe from the parent at will.

PotjiePig,

Maybe treat it more like tags, and if a community within a tag is spamming a user can still hide that community independently.

sneezycat,
@sneezycat@sopuli.xyz avatar

Doesn't that go against Lemmy's philosophy? I see where you're coming from, and I agree there should be some way to find all related communities. But putting them all under the same umbrella makes all depend on the "meta-community" and its administration.

sharkato,
sharkato avatar

I think something like this would probably be done user side, maybe with some option to share it, much like the "multireddit" feature of reddit. Each individual community is still moderated and run by their mods and local instance, but the user can choose to aggregate multiple mags/communities together.

PotjiePig,

Well yes and no. I think the point is to avoid 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, or to help users find there niche for their town or interest so you aren't left with multiple dead communities reposting questions all over the place hoping to find the community with the answer by sheer dunb luck while also thinking that Lemmy is dead.

Finding out that the official photography sub lives on glasgow.xyz is a big ask. So maybe it would be a good start to keep things fractured but allow an easy way to group them into a feed like the way multis work. Looking at my subscribed list is a horror show right now and I shudder to think of the infighting when three growing communities butt heads trying to spam each other's users to grow there own. If I can organise my coms into categories and folders that would be a start. Maybe creating feeds by tag? And subscribing to tags?

crossmr,

To some extent, this reminds me of the old BBS system. Local BBS had their own discussion boards, but they could join a larger one called 'fidonet' which allowed them to share global discussion groups between other BBS. So you could have a local news section, but there might be a news section on fido which would include more global topics. They were fully independent.

That made sense in the context of early the early 90s though, now it's a bit different. social media which is too far splintered ends up not being that social. Good to have alternatives, but yes, if you have 250 different cat groups, it's almost overload. There needs to be some kind of a happy medium there.

DistractedOrange,

There's benefit in having them separate, e.g. /m/politics on a UK server would be very different to /m/politics on a US based server. It would be nice for users to have the option to either stay 'local' or go 'global'.

Noumena,

Interesting point. The local vs global is a nice solution. I agree that having non-US groups could be a good thing, compared to reddit. It always felt like the US drowned out international perspectives. From there, have a toggle switch to bifurcate the content on demand.

honk,

I don't think this is an issue tbh.

The full name of a community includes the instance is running on. For this community here the instance is asklemmy@lemmy.ml . If you are referring to community you should include the instance to avoid confusion.

To the issue of duplicate communities: That issue existed on reddit too. Communities with slight variations in the name always existed. Sometimes the owners of some variation of the community just decided to forward their users to a "main community". Sometimes multiple communities coexist. I believe that in most cases a certain "main community" will establish itself as the one that the majority just accepts as the "real deal" because it has the most activity and the best moderation policies.

CeruleanRuin,

I think you've got it. It's only a problem that exists when communities are first starting. The best version will win out eventually, or a balance will emerge. Sometimes one will end up as a meme- or image-heavy forum, while the other one becomes primarily discussion focused.

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