Do I understand correctly that I have to subscribe to 5 different NoStupidQuestions on 5 different instances?

Kill_joy, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.

If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.

It isn't at all a new concept and I'm not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don't feel like you need.

Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.

---

Adding an edit as I've thought a bit more: I think it's important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are 'unlimited' options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.

This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.

I think it's lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you'd like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.

uhauljoe, 10 months ago

This was really well said!!

I’m here from Reddit and that’s what I’ve been doing, just subscribing to whatever I can find for each subreddit I’m losing, and then whichever one seems like it’s either most active or has the most quality content stays and I unsub from whatever sublems aren’t providing content.

This OP seems pissed off about subbing to multiple sublems that are the same but like…you don’t have to. Go use Reddit? lol

The multiple sublems thing is kinda the point of Lemmy, there isn’t one big overlord controlling everything

Undearius, 10 months ago

when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it might already be on Lemmy, not sure)

For your own awareness, cross-posting is available on Lemmy.

Kill_joy, 10 months ago

Nice! Thanks for the info :)

TheButtonJustSpins, 10 months ago

It seems to just copy the text with an intro bit, though, which doesn’t feel great.

ryathal, 10 months ago

Cross instance communities or a way to stich these places together better needs to happen though. Splinter groups making their own community is fine, but there needs to be some main communities for things.

It’s not just a make it more like reddit need. If lemmy.world decides to defederate like beehaw (or goes down), then all that content is gone from lots of other people, and the fediverse as a whole loses. If there exists a way to blend communities, then maybe people only notice less posts on memes rather than just an empty void.

It’s also a huge discovery problem, some people are going to think there isn’t an active NSQ community, and maybe try making yet another, because the didn’t find the one active community. It’s also possible that there’s 5-10 small/tiny- communities that could become a single thriving community of they were able to actually discover and coordinate with each other.

snooggums, 10 months ago

Discovering new communities that share names and topics will be the biggest core improvement in my opinion. Like having a way for an instance to poll all federated instances for communities with the same name or with a name that includes a term to easily add would be awesome.

Then the ability to combine them into subsets of your siscriptions by whatever topic you want would be awesome. Like instead of subscriptions as a while you could have 'Tabletop Gaming' with various 40k, CAV, BattleTech, and other games grouped how you want or subgroups for each game.

GiuseppeAndTheYeti, 10 months ago

It’s a sticking point because it’s new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn’t a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That’s why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there’s a pretty significant chance you’ll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities…which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.

Kichae, 10 months ago

the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple

Except for when those communities have names that aren't intuitive in any way, or the intuitively named communities are full of off-topic content.

GiuseppeAndTheYeti, 10 months ago

I’m not going to say that reddit is the bastion of how to properly run a website. Clearly r/trees r/marijuana r/earthporn so on and so forth is super unintuitive, but until the concept of how the fediverse works becomes more common knowledge, we’ll have to help new members along. It’s taken me a little more than a week to even get remotely comfortable with how it works.

I only just learned today that I can’t see content from users on instances like lemmygrad because the instance that I joined has it blocked. I didn’t even really realize what I was doing at the time. Fortunately it’s something I also would have done, but my point still stands that its not something that’s immediately apparent or intuitive.

Kichae, 10 months ago

And you can't see content from Facebook on Reddit, or from Twitter on Instagram.

The part that's unintuitive is that you can see content from users on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.

GiuseppeAndTheYeti, 10 months ago

I think that magnifies the point I was trying to make as well. Not many people understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two separate “websites” in the same way that Facebook and Instagram are. They’re both associated with Lemmy and there’s no “Lemmy.com” per se.

Rhaedas, 10 months ago

Even doing this for a month now I still forget that a lot and treat posts like Reddit posts. Being a Kbin user, I have to constantly stop myself from replying to questions about Lemmy and app suggestions for features that I already have thanks to script mods. And that's even with mods that highlight the post isn't from Kbin!

TheSpookiestUser, 10 months ago

It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it.

Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.

Rhaedas, 10 months ago

Starting up is always hard. Short of copying over a subreddit to a declared official new home (which did happen for a few), you have to build up from nothing. I think it's come a long way in only the last few weeks. I've already seen a post complimenting the response time and answers from a Lemmy community when the Reddit posts went ignored, and also I've seen one community owner realize that the other communities of similar names are doing much better and decide to close up. Another group decided the best solution was not to try and pull in other communities, but act as a general discussion that also served to link up the many specific niche communities distributed throughout Lemmy and Kbin. Lastly the attacks on .world and .ml serve as a reminder of the benefits of having duplicity. What if one of those had been a long-time established home of a community with millions of posts and got wiped from such a thing?

This is evolution in action, what works best will prevail, and part of that will be redundancy and adaptive ability.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

There is no "the community", though. These names don't "belong" to any one specific group of people, there's no "there can be only one" mandate.

As an example of why "there can be only one" is a bad thing, there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn't, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn't like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?

Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got "taken over" by right wing moderators and those who weren't of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community "Canada"?

niktemadur, 10 months ago

there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit

Those two spaces had differing stances.
There also the case of InterestingAsFuck as opposed to DamnThatsInteresting, because why the fuck does "Fuck" have to be in the title?

But then there's shameless karma-farming duplicates, like ComedyCemetery and ComedyNecromancy.

TheSpookiestUser, 10 months ago

You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the “real” community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.

But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it’s an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

There are feature requests in both Lemmy and Kbin's issue trackers for "multireddit"-like functionality, that might help when implemented.

TheSpookiestUser, 10 months ago

It would help, but frankly I think there needs to be more - both because it would be helpful and because, up to this point, Lemmy is mostly following in Reddit’s footsteps in terms of features.

Consider a “multipost” option, on top of the existing crosspost. Multiposting something to another community would push the post as-is (no edits allowed) there, then collate all comments across all communities it had been multiposted to into one comment section displayed on all of them. The original community each comment chain originated on could be marked on the parent comment, and child comments could automatically be routed so they originate from the parent community of the chain.

Just spitballing here, but something like this would help bridge the gap a lot more than just a multireddit port.

Kichae, 10 months ago

Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.

They're different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you're not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.

1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.

GunnarRunnar, 10 months ago

Yeah let's get to that million first before splitting everyone. It's really not helpful in the current state.

And there are actually options besides "this is how it currently works so it's good". Like some kind of federated communities/magazines where when you post to one it's posted to all of them. And I'm not saying it would be technically easy to implement, I have no idea, but I'm saying there are always room for improvement.

Near-identical communities/magazines with the same exact goal isn't practical.

TheSpookiestUser, 10 months ago

For the record I don’t think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while

1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic

May be true, it doesn’t hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.

Kichae, 10 months ago

Indeed, there's a viability threshold for a community, and it's probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn't doing any of them any favours.

But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey "Antenna" saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.

But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn't one of them.

TheSpookiestUser, 10 months ago

I don’t think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for “amalgamation” should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.

Kichae, 10 months ago

If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it's not, as a significant number of members won't want to amalgamate. And they shouldn't have to.

At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.

charles, 10 months ago

I think a lot of users on Reddit (including some who gave migrated to kbin/Lemmy) haven’t experienced a lot of the forum and IRC era of the internet.

As you’ve mentioned, “fractured” communities can actually be beneficial since each contribution is that much more valuable and nuances can actually exist between the similar communities. It allows things like the instance I’m on where I know I’m more likely to get a Canadian perspective in the communities on lemmy.ca versus other instances. To me that’s a huge feature over centralized platforms where those nuances would get drowned out.

MeowdyPardner, 10 months ago

I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there's less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can't universally squat on a community name

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it's necessary to consider the part after the "@" to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There's no such thing as a community named "No Stupid Questions", with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.

As an alternative solution there are issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.

Kill_joy, 10 months ago

Very well said. Great call out.

fubo, 10 months ago

You don’t have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅

AmidFuror, 10 months ago

But then there would be my tomatoes and the ones at each of my local grocery stores. Am I supposed to go get some from everywhere to enjoy tomatoes?

MorrisonMotel6, 10 months ago

It seems to me like there are 5 places the grocery store has tomatoes and and you need to check all 5 places before you know which place you should buy from. Then, maybe next time you’re at the grocery store, a different spot will have the better tomatoes and there are also 3 other new tomato stands in the store.

I’m definitely grateful for lemmy or kbin or mastodon or wherever the fuck I am right now as a reddit replacement, but this shit is confusing and annoying

AA5B, 10 months ago

Sure, and if you choose the correct place in the grocery store to get your tomatoes, you have all the fixings for a nice pico de gallo or guacamole all in one place. But why don’t they ever have chips there? I know this has to connect somewhere …… yeah

TheDoozer, 10 months ago

I think the idea is people coming from a grocery store where all the fruit and vegetables were centralized in a “produce” section and then going to a Farmers’ Market and complaining that multiple stalls sell tomatoes and having to visit all of them to go tomato shopping.

At least that’s what I’m getting from these comments. I’m new here too, and getting used to it, but I get a Farmers’ Market vibe.

MorrisonMotel6, 10 months ago

That’s a good perspective. Thank you for that. I’ll try to look at it like a farmer’s market from now on

snooggums, 10 months ago

I go to two different grocery stores to get different vegetables because they have varying quality. For example, if I want tomatoes I go to store 1 and for onions I go to store 2. For carrots I go to either because they are fine at both.

So if two instances have tomato, onion, and carrot magazines/communities with similar quality patterns I might want to sub tomatoes at one, onions at the other, and carrots at both.

I just want an easier way to find all of the instances that have onions so I know what I might be missing at the local farmer's market. Or find out that a new farmer's market opened up!

stringere, 10 months ago

What is a “better” onion? More variety, maybe? Onions come in two kinds for me (other than type) edible and not; not a lot of spectrum on onion quality for me I guess.

Just about any other fruit or vegetable I can accept the varying quality of produce but onions and potatoes are either firm and good or mushy and not for me.

Or I could be overthinking what was probably an arbitrarily pulled example for an explanatory analogy.

snooggums, 10 months ago

Fresh, not bruised, the size I like, in stock. Just better quality overall. Same with the tomatoes at the other store.

I have no idea why there is such a difference in quality consistently for those two vegetables, but it has been consistent for a couple of years.

Since the two stores are within 5 minutes of each other and there are other reasons to go to each (brands, deli, bakery,etc.) I split the vegetables while I'm at it.

stringere, 10 months ago

Fair enough. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a grocer with consistently bruised/rotted onions. I’ll go ahead and put that in the plus column.

pruwybn, 10 months ago

!tomatoes

fubo, 10 months ago

Cool! I’m not growing as many tomatoes this year as some years — we’ve gone in heavily for strawberries and herbs this spring, and potatoes this summer — but I’ve got a Brad’s Atomic Grape and an Indigo Ruby starting to set fruit.

static09, 10 months ago

For real, man. Homegrown tomatoes are fkn delicious.

lando55, 10 months ago

If y’all aren’t growing your own butter lettuce then you’re missing out on one of the best things in life

ImFresh3x, 10 months ago

Ever had dry farmed tomatoes? They’re like regular homegrown tomatoes but with twice the flavor.

Tangent5280, 10 months ago

What’s dry farming? Limiting water supply?

ImFresh3x, 10 months ago

Essentially no watering. Only works with places with some mild temps, a 20 inches of rain per year, and some morning fog etc.

Where appropriate climate and soil conditions exist, growing dry-farmed tomatoes can be a good option for specialty crops growers. Dry farming generates an intensely flavored crop much prized by consumers and retailers.

A limited number of geographic regions are suited to dry farming, which requires adequate winter rainfall and—in the case of annual crops—a summer-time marine influence that generates cool mornings and warm afternoons. These climatic conditions, combined with careful soil preparation, appropriate variety selection, adequate plant spacing, and vigilant weed control are all required to successfully produce dry-farmed crops.

agroecology.ucsc.edu/…/dry-farmed-tomatoes.pdf

Tangent5280, 10 months ago

Thanks for your reply. I haven’t heard about this directly, but I have noticed that birds-eye-chilly plants(don’t know if this is the right name for it) get chillies that are so much more eye-watering-throat-burning-ass-blastingly spicy in the summer than other seasons. It even seems to do better when it’s NOT watered than when it is.

stringere, 10 months ago

In this heat?! Masochist.

edit: or sadist, no judgement.

daniyyel, 10 months ago

For now yes, but over time probably no. Multiple communities around the same subject are created on different instances. They’ll compete to become the most active one. Then everyone will subscribe to that one, and it will grow even more. However, if over time you don’t like that one any more (e.g. don’t agree with the mods) you can start a community with the same name somewhere else and compete again to become the most active one (or not, and stay small if that is preferred).

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA, 10 months ago

I mean you can, but there are instances I don’t want to be federated with because of some of the content they host (which is moot for this discussion and I’m not thinking enough into whether they’re any of these four). In those cases, I wouldn’t want to subscribe to those specific communities. Kind of a guilt by association thing. Shitty, but it’s how the system works.

Zyansheep, 10 months ago

There are multiple communities because these are all different servers, which don’t coordinate community names with each other.

There are some feature proposals on the lemny issue tracker that try to address this issue in different ways…

ZagTheRaccoon, 10 months ago

There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.

You don’t have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.

JackbyDev, 10 months ago

have to

Why would you think that?

croobat, 10 months ago

Just let it settle organically.

Yearly1845, 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

marmo7ade, 10 months ago

Eh, not necessarily. It’s the nature of humans that want power.

Exhibit A: lemmy.world/u/sabbah

BloodyStupidJohnson, 10 months ago

Thanks for the link. Blocked him. I’m brand new here and still learning but that’s definitely the kind of shit I want to avoid.

Copernican, 10 months ago

I think there will probably be a natural selection of which one prevails. But each instances may have different rules and different mods. So follow and unfollow the few that have what you like. It would be nice in the future though to ability to create aggregate subs or find aggregate subs like a multi-subreddit for a given topic.

irkli, 10 months ago

No offense, but you’re argument reveals that you’re thinking of all this fedi stuff as a service provided to you, like Facebook or reddit.

It is not. It is people like you and me creating and taking part in them.

These tools are BRAND NEW. It is likely the creators of one didn’t know about the other(s) at that time. This is US doing all this for US not a corporation making tools to suck people in to advertise to.

Not gonna crit you further. You probably don’t remember the internet before the corps ruined it.

0rly, 10 months ago

Can you be any more condescending? Op has a point, it is not ideal to have the same community on different instances. There is no need to be a dick about it.

irkli, 10 months ago

Sorry, didn’t mean to be dickish. I just reread my post. Saying “sounds like you’re expecting a corporate experience” was an observation is not an insult.

Decentralized stuff is fundamentally different than centralized coordinates corporate stuff. Serious question, do you understand how it is that so many people can start so many similar communities?

dangblingus, 10 months ago

It’s not the same community. It’s 5 different communities on 5 different instances that all happen to have the same name. It will be the owners of those communities to determine whether or not they want to consolidate.

fsxylo, 10 months ago

Wait until they find out that there used to be hundreds of websites all talking about the same thing?

And it was magical.

marmo7ade, 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

postmateDumbass, 10 months ago

Thw internet was much better before corporations dug their teeth in.

Better as in more information, much of it useful, but far less monetary reward for narcissism.

dmention7, 10 months ago

Yeah, as someone who used to frequent car forums back in the day, one way I think about it is you might have Mazda, Subaru, Ford, Chevy, etc specific forums. And they all had subsections devoted to suspension upgrades, with a lot of content that would look really similar to someone just getting into cars. But they also met the different needs of the different communities, and had their own vibes and culture.

Now imagine all those communities could interact with each other directly, and you end up with something like what we’re getting with the Fediverse.

Or maybe I’m just too hung up on analogies, idk.

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA, 10 months ago

Oh dude you just reminded me of the guitar tab websites. Those were fun and fucked up all at the same time.

Teodomo, 10 months ago

I don’t understand why some people have an issue with this but maybe is due to the way I have browsed Reddit for years, do with Mastodon now and plan to keep doing with Lemmy though I still haven’t finished setting it up. I like having different “home pages”, much like in Mastodon I can browse my following feed, the instance feed and the federated feed depending on the kind of content I want to look at that moment. Or all of them in succession if I want to check it all. When I was in Twitter I had to use lists to resemble something like this.

Reddit was even better for this if you took the time to set it up: if you suscribed to every single thing that caught your attention no matter your level of interest in it your suscribed feed ended up being clogged by the most popular subreddits among your suscribed communities, so you wound up missing out on some interesting posts in your more niche, slow communities. My solution was to only suscribe to the smallest communities where I didn’t want to miss a single one of the posts (for example staples like GameDeals or some other minor communities I was temporarily fixated into, like say a specific videogame or themed subreddit -I unsuscribed from those when I got tired of them). Then, slowly and naturally while I browse keep heavily heavily curating the general feed by using the filter/block function, getting rid of anything that didn’t interest me or wasn’t good for me (in whatever way you want to interpret it, for example filtering ragebait subs) or often innocuous big subs I was tired of seeing or whose whole shtick had grown old. The result was a smaller suscribed feed I could quickly check daily with the reassurance that I wouldn’t miss out on anything from those communities and a general feed that was always interesting to me but with the potential to show any kind of new community for me to decide to keep or filter away.

wheeldawg, 10 months ago

Can we get some multicommunities that can include some of most active for a given community across whichever instance they’re in that can be subscribed to at once?

Or does that feature exist already and I just don’t know about it? There were multireddits before. Not quite the same use case, but similar concept.

Kolanaki, 10 months ago

No. You don’t have to. But if you want to throw a wide net and not just wind up with a singular place with a unified mentality, it’s good to have multiple places focused on the same topic. For perspective.

Chickenstalker, 10 months ago

You have stepped through the Looking Glass, Alice. Welcome to the MultiFediverse.

tegs_terry, 10 months ago

Begin at the beginning, then continue until you reach the end. Then, stop.