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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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[โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The issue I then see with that is well, which duplicate instance gets to be the Highlander? ๐Ÿ˜‹ 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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  • [โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 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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  • [โ€“] 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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