I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.

The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.

Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.

  • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    I agree on that point. I find myself wanting to block the extraneous news communities to only see one copy of a story instead of six, but have no idea which ones to consider the extras.

    • livus@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      Hmm one hack for you would be to take a look at the feeds for news collections on http://kbin.social/magazines/collections and get a sense of which are most active, then sub to them or block others.

      Or you could just pick the ones where you like the comments.

      I block all the big meme communities to improve my All.

      • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        hmmm, ok, thanks, I’ll give that a shot. Pretty much all meme communities are already blocked here, that’s not an issue. The main problem with news communities is I’m trying to avoid subscribing to them so my subscribed feed is spared all the stressful content if I want a break from it, but I may have to compromise there.

    • betabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      11 months ago

      Same, on many topics. How would I know which community will have the most activity, or none at all. It’s my biggest issue here. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

      • livus@kbin.social
        2·
        11 months ago

        @betabob when you search communities in lemmy doesn’t it give you number of posts? That’s a pretty good indication.

        Way I see it, join em all, you soon see what is and isn’t active in your feed.

        • betabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          0·
          11 months ago

          Sure, but I feel like there is still fluctuation and more often than not a varying degree of activity and posts that it makes it hard to stick to just one (identical) community for now. I’m sure it’ll settle over time though.