@DasRubberDuck Thew lack of community federation was super confused for me in the very beginning. Personally i think, communities would be the most important part to federate, cause that data would be lost otherwise if an instance goes down. I could live with loosing my account and my "connections" to other people but loosing all the information in all those communities would be horrible.
Yes, exactly this. Using Reddit as an anology, each Subreddit should be it’s own instance, rather than having duplicate subreddits across many instances.
Yeah we need something like multireddits which have collections of communities across instances that can be subscribed to instead of the individual communities themselves. So your worldnews could be a single subscription of all the worldnews communities across lemmy.world, beehaw, etc. De-duping for extra credit!
That's not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that's linked it. Then you'd see the link once, but could see the post from each community that's linked it rolled up underneath it.
Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect "hot links" in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.
A lot of this is purely teething issues related to (1) the fact federation seems difficult to understand to some people and (2) the fact it’s early and people keep thinking “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a WORLD NEWS forum?” and they create it without realizing that actually a ton of other people have already created one.
It’s not like Reddit didn’t have a ton of duplicate or overlapping subs.
Maybe it should be easier to merge subs and instance admins could maybe encourage it if there’s no obvious reason why they have a sub that’s clearly a duplicate of one on another server.
I think that's more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the local neighborhoods; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities.
In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It's ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get cut off from your preferred one. You can still get out and explore the nearby neighborhoods, but they have the same Starbucks and MicroCenter that yours does. This still is useful in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI's.
Yeah, I mean once it became clear the the Threadiverse would be populated by tens of thousands of self-exiles from Reddit who left for a bunch of issues, relatively few of them directly related to how federation should work (i.e. people like me), it was sort of bound to happen to any general interest instance.
The Star Trek and the security instances (and even lemmygrad) are probably more how the model was envisioned. I'm not entirely sure it's "better," but it is better suited to the infrastructure that was in place.
Yeah a big part of the reason why this is happening is because the vast majority of people coming here don’t give a shit about federation they just want a version of Reddit that isn’t Reddit.
I guarantee if another Reddit alternative starts growing that is centralized and more aligned with how reddit was, these people will leave for it.
I was on Squabbles for a bit when the API changes were looming. It was fine, I ran into nice folks, but more than the performance or the community, I was concerned that a single centralized site, run by one dude, who seemed determined to set it up to quickly monetize, was not going to be sustainable.
I admit that federation was not why I came to Kbin, but if federated sites are where open-internet folks are sharing links and pics and discussing them, then that's where I was headed. For that reason, I'm not sure most of the people who are still active here would leave for any ol' platform. It would need to sell itself as a place that will not Digg or Reddit itself.
I suppose the good thing is that anyone who is deeply invested in federation working exactly how it was originally envisioned can continue to pursue that goal with their own instances, up to the point where they consider defederation with the (relative) normies.
I appreciate the poster sharing the article to multiple communities/instances, but would be nice if the Lemmy front-end could batch these (maybe with a link like “appears in a@b, b@b, c@a …”) if the user + link + title all hashed out to the same thing.
There are a couple of users I recognize just because of the amount of duplicate/triplicate/quadruplicate posts I see from them, often times grouped up like that too.
Because there’s more then one community of the same topic. They’re actually doing a really good thing, they’re trying to grow multiple communities. It’s not karma farming here, it’s supporting communities. That is much preferably then people only submitting to the biggest community and create more centralization.
Hadn’t thought about it like that. Thanks. I think this will become less of an annoyance over time, too. The more communities show up and get active, the more I subscribe to, then the more I’ll use my subscribe feed and therefore won’t see the duplicates.
The whole point of making a federated network of independent instances is to avoid the issues arising with one central instance, right? Putting the content out to multiple instances plays into that: If it’s important content, no single authority can easily censor it, and the loss of a single instance won’t erase it.
If it’s trash, of course, every community in every instance you post it to will have to clean it up separately. Arguably, that puts more strain on the respective moderation teams, but if (ideally) those are disjunct people (again, to avoid the issues of a single authority), the strain should be distributed.
And on the plus side, it would enable each community (in the lemmy sense) to enforce their own nuanced rules, additionally leading to slightly more choice between the types of moderation you favour (as opposed to “There’s one big sub, take it or leave it”).
Individual communities may be smaller, but maybe some more form of coordination of similar communities across instances could amend that (like linking to the other communities in your sidebar etc.).
I could also imagine a super-community solution that would allow you to aggregate several communities across instances similar to multireddits. I’m new here, so I’m not sure if that exists, nor have I given the implementation any thought, but I suppose that could be convenient.
I also find that. Connect would rerun the same posts quite quickly. Sync also seems to not show me so many non-English instances, although perhaps I’ve blocked them all?
I suggested an idea to fix this, that I called "thread entanglement". I had suggested it for Kbin specifically, before, but honestly the base Lemmy software could use something like this. I'd love to see some sort of smart merging of duplicate threads like this be possible.
As others have mentioned in that thread. It would be better as an option from the user side rather than site wide forced implementation. I hope you open a GitHub issue/discussion in the repository so the idea could get more exposure.
I sort by active and this is how my feed looks. Except I see the duplicates every 5-6 posts. But I see the same ~10 posts for maybe 100+ with a few non-duplicates sprinkled in. Same with sorting by hot.
And then 24h later, it’s the same feed, with the same duplicates.
36h later and still maybe 1/2 are the same duplicates from 2 days prior.
It’s pretty bad, finding threads I’m interested in keeps getting harder and harder.
Sorting by new or new comments does not usually result in seeing the same post across multiple instances all bunched together like this. This is what you’d see sorting by Hot or Active or just looking at your subscriptions when youre subscribed to multiple communities centered around the same topic.
I have been sorting by New Comments since a week into using Lemmy and even though I am subscribed to multiple duplicate communities, I rarely if ever see two of the same exact posts side by side. Those I do tend to be posted by the same user in the same short amount of time.
Yahoo Finance managed to make itself real damn useful, and that’s one of the most lucrative ad markets, if not THE most lucrative.
When I woke my Yahoo Mail account from its ancient slumber, everything was in Spanish for some reason, and I expect that reason is that they expanded outside the US and have a large user base in South America, where Yahoo probably doesn’t look as dead. “Free email” goes even farther when your country doesn’t get to have the world’s reserve currency. So Yahoo just defaulted to Spanish for accounts until I had to tell it I’m a gringo.
Americans really do have a hard time remembering the rest of the globe exists, but our companies don’t, so a lot of companies that seem “dead” are just really active outside the US.
So yeah, somebody is still using Yahoo News. Quite a lot of somebodies, actually. Even Americans. Especially Americans. They hooked us with real nice stock market quotes and such. That’s how you reel a Yankee back in, make it easy to see that revenue trend at a glance.
I’m originally from Australia where Yahoo used to be very big, but I don’t think it’s commonly used there now either. Australia generally copies the US though, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Yahoo News is popular in some countries outside US and AU.
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