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Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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Over the past few days, I've witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

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[–] 2 points 3 years ago (24 children)

I don’t think I’m understanding this right cause it sounds like you’re trying to make it more fun by adding more rules. If there are 20 groups that are all about pickles that’s fine they each like running things their own way. Eventually one group gets popular and that’s where the majority goes. I think your frustration could better be solved with something like tags where groups could choose to associate certain tags words that makes search easier like tag: pickles-fermenting-homemade-cucumbers and that could clear up search from people just wanting to share pickle Rick memes.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Yes the fragmentation is a feature not a bug. There are dozens of reasons why people might want to leave a community and create their own alternative version. With blackjack and hookers.

    Combining communities should be a front end feature... Allow users to merge their views if they want. But it should not be enforced at the backend or federation level.

    Eventually there will be third party apps which can do this merging in their interface if someone wants it.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Combining communities should be a front end feature… Allow users to merge their views if they want. But it should not be enforced at the backend or federation level.

    Eventually there will be third party apps which can do this merging in their interface if someone wants it.

    I agree with this. The grouping should be a front-end feature based on hashtags, as someone else mentioned, instead of the community names. Alternatively, there could be lists that you can simply copy and paste to create your own multireddit, eliminating the need for hashtags. However, considering that the original issue was already on the lemmy-ui, I'm not sure why you brought up the backend.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    One thing I do agree with is that discoverability should be better. Can't remember the url now but there's a site which crawls all instances and creates a searchable list of all communities. This should seriously be built in. Have all instances generate a list of all communities which is broadcast, cached by all, and searchable by all.

    This "paste a url of a community you already found into the search box" concept is not good enough.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    I like the idea that tags could facilitate a sort of one-to-many and many-to-one relationship structure, where a pickle community could say it is related to "Canning" and "Cucumbers" among others, and potentially populate in the feed of someone interested in prepper stuff or in the feed of someone interested in vegetable gardening. I'm sure I'm not using the DB terms correctly but they feel indicative of the modular structure this could allow.

    I like this flexibility better than the idea of a consolidation of subs into one themed silo, but I could be misunderstanding the structure of the mulit-reddit proposal if it allows for this.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    The thing is that say i want to see all the pickle content across the lemmy-verse, i want to just be able to subscribe to an umbrella "pickles" category and get all the c/pickles content from any instance my instance federates with without worrying that i missed a community or something. If there are 20 groups but i only know of 1 or 2, odds are that i'll miss the biggest ones with a bunch of pickle content that i want. And I don't want to have to manually go through, search for all the biggest instances, and subscribe to each pickle community one by one. Plus, say a new instance is started and it's pickles community blows up. I'll miss it because i already searched through and subscribed to all the pickles communities that were available when i joined. I'd rather default to subscribing to all the c/pickles communities my instance sees, and then if one instance is posting stuff i don't want to see i could manually exclude them

    Tldr I guess it depends what you think will take more effort to do manually. I think having to manually find and subscribe to every community i want from across the lemmyverse (and periodically run the search again to find new communities) would be way more work than subscribing to every c/pickles my instance can see and manually excluding the instances or instance-specific-communities i don't want content from

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I'm new to the whole concept of federation, so please let me know if I'm missing something fundamental, but with your proposal (subscribing to all c/pickles) works for when each instance has the same general rules for posts, but what about when one c/pickles on some server is actually about... dildos? (like r/trees was about pot, and r/marijuanaenthusiasts was about trees)?

    Wouldn't your feed be polluted with pics and reviews of dildos when you want wholesome and healthy pickle recipes?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    That's where manually being able to block specific instances would come in. So if you subscribe to every c/pickles your instance federates with but then didlos.lemmy/c/pickles starts causing problems, you could manually block that one instance. Or maybe you want to see dildos but not when you're looking at pickles, you could choose to manually exclude didlos.lemmy/c/pickles from your c/pickles subscription

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    That makes sense, but sounds like it'd be a constant spam battle. Maybe I'm overthinking it, or just thinking about how I'd go about breaking/attacking something to try to figure out how to fix it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (8 children)

    Or just make it user-side. Let users create their own feed combinations. They'd still have to select a specific instance for posts.

    Feeds would be consolidated but posts and comments will still be federated. And one user will be unaffected by how another user organizes their feed.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    That seems like a good solution. Let me subscribe to a half dozen different game comms and put them together into one "games" list that shows up with pretty much the same interface as a single community, so I can browse just "games" content that I have subscribed to.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

    having subscribed to multiple games communities, the issue then becomes content duplication; the same trailer or article will get posted in three different communities, and I don't actually want to see it three times in my feed. I'm not sure there's a good way to solve that, though.

    (I'm subscribed to multiple communities b/c I'm not sure which one will have the largest comments sections, and those are what I'm really interested in.)

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Later on there could potentially be an "exclude duplicate links" option which will automatically filter out the duplicate posts which contain the exactly the same link and show only the post with the highest interaction count. Unsure if that would be valuable enough to implement as a feature though.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The issue I then see with that is well, which duplicate instance gets to be the Highlander? πŸ˜‹ Does the system automatically show you the post with the most comments? The one that's had its link clicked most? The one from the largest community?

    Also, how do you prevent this from being hijacked? Say I post some bright, shiny new OC meme, only to have some bot immediately repost it with exactly the same title, etc...

    Not that I have any solutions for any of this, mind...

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah these are all great points. It would definitely need to be workshopped to see if there are solutions to some of this or if other approaches are better.

    My first thought would be that the top duplicate in the feed would be the one that would be shown (so based on up/down votes I guess). The others would be lower in the list anyway so you would only see those duplicates after the top one if they were there. Simply filtering them out and maybe having a way to show a list of duplicates on the visible one might be good. Then you could choose the comment section of the smaller duplicates of you want to read more comments or whatever. Still lots of unknowns but I feel like it could possibly work.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Of course, it's a whole new platform, there's bound to be all sorts of things that need ironing out. Tbh I just think it's a good sign already that these are things that are being discussed (or are open for discussion at all, for that matter) and not just unilaterally decided.

    Also, I hope my comment didn't come across as being disparaging or anything... All my criticism was intended to be constructive, I promise

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Nah, all good! This is the kind of discussion I have at work when we're deciding what feature to implement or the nuances in the implementation so I definitely don't see it in a negative way. In a week or so when I have more time, I'm going to see if I can put some time into helping fix bugs or improve the android app. It's exciting to potentially be part of the group to shape the platform at these early stages!

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    I don't know why you are bitching about rules and frustration.

    I believe the best approach would be to have these multireddits automatically created for convenience. However, users should have the option to choose whether they want to see only the content from their instance's community or from any number of communities, instead of being forced to view all of them.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I think that approach is needlessly complicated and would confuse people more than help them. There should be a way for individual users to merge the feeds from multiple communities in a multilemmy if they specifically choose to.

    But I don't see any way to create such multireddits/multilemmys automatically because there is no objective categorization. Everyone is going to have a different opinion about which communities fit together and which ones are similar but different enough to keep separate. Instead of forcing a generalist solution that makes everyone unhappy, just give people the tools to build their own solution that works best for them.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I would prefer something pre-made for convenience but that can be modified by each user to adjust to their preference. I'd rather have a generalist solution forced on me than have to spend countless hours grouping communities from hundreds of instances.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    I think you're vastly overestimating how many communities actually matter. At least 90% of communities will be ghost towns. It's just too early to tell right now because the platform is basically in its first week of existence. You're planning a solution to a problem that won't exist.

    I get it, some of the first comments I made when I joined were about how to combine communities across multiple instances. As I've spent more time here, I've begun to understand that it's not actually a problem. The easy solution is to subscribe to the biggest community and/or one on your home instance.

    Besides that, I don't see much of a difference between manually going through hundreds of communities to add the ones you want, or going through hundreds of communities on a pre made list to remove the ones you don't want.

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