One of the biggest issues I'm having trouble getting past with Lemmy is not knowing which communities to subscribe to.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for "technology", do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
Is there a way to "clump" these communities together so I can just subscribe to one "multi-community" that houses the posts from all of them?
I, too, am annoyed by this one. It's like people forgot that reddit had multiple tech subs too, you just picked the biggest one usually. This is no different, just nothing is big yet. Maybe its that last part that bothers people.
I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic "technology", and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we'll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.
Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let's you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.
Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.
Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the "metacommunities" they think they want.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it's not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest.
That kinda misses the point, though. For me it's more about promoting decentralization than it's about whether people's reasons to want to join all communities on a topic make sense (they actually can for niche topics). Without a feature like that, I fear people will just all join the largest community on the topic and "centralize" it.
Making people go scrounging over ten subs is the ideal way to reduce your subscriber base. It’s also a shitty model for a link aggregator and a terrible way for people to ask questions and get answers. Not all of us have ten hours a day to scroll through multiple communities on the same topic, with the same article posted 8 times with 8 different discussion threads and some goober posting the same inane comment on all eight. It’s a waste of time.
There are perfectly good reasons for similar communities with a different focus to co-exist. Making the Fediverse harder and more Byzantine to use is a terrible reason to want it, though.
It's helpful to understand what the rules and values of an instance is to evaluate if a duplicate community is worth subscribing to. There will be dominant communities that shake out. Subscribe to a bunch now and then reevaluate in a month.
Yeah, that would be cool. Right now we only have 3 options: All, Local, or Subscribed. I'd love a submenu that let me generate an individualized feed based on multiple subscriptions that I grouped together, and also let me name & save these feeds.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
r/technology was never the only technology subreddit. There was retro, retrotechnology, who knows perhaps something like bambootechnology, cartechnology, etc. So you never had that experience. You had the same experience you would and do have here, except there it was tinted with a veil of capitalism to keep you submissive. What you are seeing now, is the normal, always has been (insert “always has been” meme). The “big pharmas” of the internet are actually the outlier.
As for the task of “clumping” those communities, I’d surmise in the “content fetching” form that would be the task of a community aggregator, like lemmy itself if eventually a “lists” feature is added, or if communities are allowed to follow each other. Or, if we keep the cross-aggregation separate from the content posting, so that it’s possible to do both or either witout requiring a super VPS, maybe a webring could do it. I remember webrings from the 90s. They were cool.
Think these "fractured" distributed communities are the new normal we need to embrace moving forward. It seems like we've been conditioned to think in terms of corporations and monopolies for too long, and maybe, just maybe, a more "splintered" approach could work better.
Why does everything need to fit in one uniform or under one roof? Humanity is diverse, and we have diverse experiences.
It's about ease of use. If there are two very similar communitites both with decent amount of content that interests you, you want to follow both and you don't want to think about which is which. You don't care. You want the content.
Wanting more diverse experiences and perspectives is exactly why its beneficial having large amounts of people concentrated in one community. People want to be able to interact with a large amount of people, in one place where they can get the benefit of the collective knowledge and experience.
This is like saying "why do libraries have categories, we should just all under one roof." I shouldn't have to go to 5 different sections of the library to get self help books
Subscribing to 10 technology communities will likely get you a much, much more vibrant experience than just subbing to r/technology. People actually, you know, discuss things in smaller spaces, rather than just drop drive-by comments that no one will ever read.
My wacky solution for this would be to make use of kbin's microblogging feature to see which magazines are associated with what tags, then suggest magazines with similar tag profiles. However, this doesn't really help with cross-pollinating Lemmy-based communities.
Multireddits would be nice, as would some actual activity in the fediverse that isn't just talking about the fediverse.
What about all of the other technology communities? Forums, Web sites, chat rooms, books, magazines, local clubs? We need a way to clump them all together and subscribe to them all at once.
I'm hoping for two features: Let communities "follow" other communities - so one community's content also shows up on the other. And let me group communities together on my personal feed, if they don't want to follow each other for some reason. For now, I stay mostly on the home page, which aggregates everything - but I'd much prefer to be able to browse by topic and still have some aggregation.
I found that the app Connect for Lemmy has the best implementation so far to deal with this. The common community names aren't aggregated into single feed, but when you look at your subscriptions, they are listed and grouped by the community name, rather than the instance. So, for example, I see all the "technology" communities next to each other in the list.
Just subscribe to all of them if you're that worried about missing something. It's really not that complicated.
Also, stop worrying about reenacting your Reddit experience. Lemmy is not Reddit. Figure out what you like about Lemmy and focus on enhancing that instead of stressing about forcing Lemmy into your preconceived notion of what it should be.
If sub.rehab shows 5 threadiverse alternatives for a subreddit, I'll have a look at each and often sub to 2-3 with the highest subscriber count/posts I like. I'll then monitor them over time to see which, if any, to unsub from.
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