So I notice that KBIN and BEEHAW and LEMMY all have duplicate pages dedicated to the same content. Are we as a community going to have to decide which page will be the 'main' page, will we have to subscribe to each magazine for each instance, or will they consolidate eventually?
So like, theres a technology@beehaw, a technology@lemmy, and a tech for kbin. Does it make sense to spend time cultivating one, if another ends up getting more attention?
They're not really "duplicate". Each instance has it's own magazines/communites/whatever, and those can have different rules, moderators, etc.
If you want to follow all of them, then follow all of them. If you only want one of them, then do one of them. Reddit had various subreddits all on the same topic, for instance /r/technology and /r/tech, and they had their own nuances, users, rules, etc. One might end up being more popular than the other for whatever reason.
Also keep in mind that they're subject to rules/moderation/control of the instance they're on. I'm using kbin.social, but if beehaw decides to do some weird thing or decide they no longer want a technology group, it's basically out of my control. Whereas a technology group here on kbin.social wouldn't be effected by beehaw's stance for their instance as a whole.
I imagine people interested in a topic will just follow all the related groups unless there's an issue with one of them.
I wonder if it would be worth it to have an option to combine content of communities with the same name from different federations into one feed automatically.
Part of those options could be to exclude a community from a certain federation from that feed if their content in that community does not match the others (r/superbowl for instance, where the name does not match the expected content)
I might be wrong about this, but KBin supports “tags” which can be set at a Magazine level by the mods. This will lump content related to this tags into the Magazine. It won’t be in the feed directly, but will be listed as related content.
Something like multi-magazines but fediverse-wide would be a neat, imagine you want to share content to your kbin magazine but also want to share to the community at Lemmy.
I agree, I've been thinking about this myself. It would be nice to have the ability to sub to a group of like communities say we call it a super community. Of course there would need to be a way to vote on what belongs to a group. Not sure if this would be something that would be accepted by the federation of something that may be done by a specific instance that focuses on aggregation.
100% agree. But we should never try to force things to "one." There should never be just one community for a topic. That's what Reddit is. "This is the videos subreddit, if you don't like it you don't have a choice."
Good communities will rise. Bad communities will fall. Some communities will attract users because they're big and have lots of members. Some communities will attract users because they're small and friendly. Choice is good. Fixating on there only being "one" of anything is bad.
It the admins on one server are assholes, they don't have the power to ruin it for everyone.
Exactly. One of the big issues with the r-site. There's only one community for any one topic and there are more users (and content) than they could possibly use. Ever tried posting to /r/ShowerThoughts? It's virtually impossible to come up with a topic that makes it through the filter. And it won't change because deleting 90% of submissions still leaves more than enough content to fill the page. It's easier for mods to just delete content en masse and ban a user than even engage in a conversation with them.
(I'm not picking on the mods on /r/ShowerThoughts, I've never interacted with them. I'm just using the sub as an example where the community is so big that an individual user is just an annoying gnat in the grand scheme of things).
This gets into another problem. You'll never reach the critical mass that reddit did by having almost everyone on the same page. You had experts from every field commenting on some articles. Loads of knowledge in one place. It would've been awesome to have something like that.
Ok so for example, if you wanted to subscribe to the technology group on Lemmy you would just type technology@lemmy.ml into the search bar on Kbin and click the subscribe button. You can then also do the same for technology@beehaw.org and they will all show up on your Kbin feed.
Or just find a post that is already on that place, click the community/magazine name to go to its landing page, and click the subscribe button -- realistically, this is going to be the workflow for most.
Odds are if you are interested in subscribing to content on another instance, it is because that content already went under your nose and you liked how it smelled. Click click is very intuitive.
I might be wrong, but I've noticed that right now, if you subscribe to a magazine, you subscribe to all subreddit-equivalents across instances with the same name. Let me tell you that subscribing to !random led to interesting stuff in my feed...
Great timing for this post because Beehaw just defederated two very large instances for having open signups. Kbin is big and has open signups too, so you guys are next on the chopping block. Yes, it is a good idea to cultivate multiple communities so that if one instance makes a stupid decision like that, there will be a good replacements available.
Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.
In the real world I can't even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.
The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren't necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo'd into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.
Is there another way? We're assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you'll find one on a different instance...
I expect people will see there's existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.
Things will eventually sort themselves and people will likely gravitate where the community forms. It's best that it isn't forced and just let it happen.
This is really no different than Reddit. There have always been multiple subreddits for the same topic, with slightly different names. Many were created because the “originals” were found lacking at some point.
There’s nothing wrong with people having multiple options. We may eventually end up in a situation like Reddit where certain magazines/communities of the same topic are more trafficked than others and the less trafficked ones “die”.
I think there’s going to be a kind of lifecycle thing that comes with these things. They’ll sort of naturally sort themselves out. To artificially guide it one way or the other would be to imitate the mistakes of Reddit or past aggregate sites.
I hope they don't get consolidated-that's the entire point after all. One choice for everybody is what the corporate sites have been forcing on us for years. Let small communities develop organically. Who cares if there is some overlap? I belong to three ham radio clubs in Real Life and I value each for what it is. Combining them would kill all of what I like about them.
It can make sense to have duplicate communities on multiple instances in some situations. For example, if instance A and instance B both have Technology communities, but instance A is defederated from instance C, then that redundancy is valuable to instance C.
There are also ways to reduce redundancy — for example, different rulesets on instance A and B could result in different content in their respective Technology communities. And the questions that show up on each are bound to diverge in some ways.
Ultimately, though, my hope is that admins on the post ranking flank of the fediverse starting looking for more ways to distinguish their instances from one another. Self-hosting presents a number of opportunities that weren't really available on a siloed corporate platform like Reddit. There's no reason, for example, that an admin couldn't start up a Medical instance, and subdivide it into much more topical communities/magazines than you'd find on a "generalistic" instance, e.g. Neurology, Cardiovascular, Podiatry, and so on.
(Just as an aside, Beehaw is a Lemmy instance, so it's not really distinct from Lemmy in the same way that Kbin is distinct from Lemmy.)
Each community has different mods and different admins (with different rules superseeding the mod rules). Everyone will probably use one of them (or whoever moderates content best) until there's mod/admin drama and switch over to another one.
I thought it was kind of funky at first. But I do like the idea that if one of them turns into some reddit-like hellhole, there will most likely be something similar on another instance. It doesn't take much to subscribe to multiple similar subs.
That's fair. I just wanna be sure that i'm not sharing content that nobody is bothering to read because there's a more popular instance somewhere that I'm unawares of
That's fair. I'm new, so take what I have to say with a huge grain of salt. I've just been subscribing to all the technology@<whatever> that I see and hope to catch most posts. If they get so big that they start duplicating and annoying amount of material, I figure I'll just cut back from whichever ones seem to have the least value. Least value for me.
I suggest that you don't worry very much about how many people read your posts, especially in early days. I've seen people super stressed about how they can't make their posts on Mastodon go viral enough. The scale here will be smaller.
go where you want to go. one may be bigger than another and steal the majority of the traffic, c'est la vie.
there is nothing wrong with multiple fediverse instances creating similar magazines/subs
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