For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.
What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?
For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.
What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?
I like the idea of different communities. A single giant “community” like reddit feels too big. Effectively no one can participate and the only content you see is the least common denominator. Ideally we’ll continue to see at least a few popular instances and not just conglomerate back to one giant instance. I think what needs to happen though is a better integration of local vs federal instances. There should be a toggle within a certain community page to see versions from other instances. Or a way to merge multiple community posts together.
This is a good point. Some users prefer being in a community with a lower number of subscribers. Not everyone wants to post in a community with a million users so having big and small communities for the same thing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It gives people the choice to decide which one they want to participate in.
Right, I don’t know if anyone would want to post in a super giant community like reddit. Your post just gets lost in the void, content gets completely dumbed dumb, and no one knows anyone because there is too many users. This was a huge of appeal of the old time forums which got killed with reddit. I think the internet is going to fundamentally change.
That’s actually a great point. Haven’t really done much posting on reddit for the past couple of years but really enjoy the more intimate feel of lemmy atm. We’ll see how it all pans out but I yearn for the old phpbb days of the internet :D
You’re not the first to say this. Back during the Twitter migration to Mastodon last year we saw thousands of users who were excited that it felt like a return to the original web of the early thousands.
And in some ways, yeah, it is.
I think it depends on the community. For entertainment stuff like videos, anime, memes, etc. I’d prefer a bunch of smaller ones. But hobby type communities, where you aren’t only looking at newest posts, I’d rather one big organized community.
For instance, if I want to buy some new headphones then is would be a pain to have to look through 6 different instances for a stickied reccomendation thread.
It is surely going to be a bigger time sink and possibly more effective skinner box if I have to click back and forth between half a dozen different communities to follow different threads on stuff like breaking news or game/event threads.
I think this will ultimately be polarizing, but I also kind of think it will have a lot of really interesting side effects as it scales.
Well you don’t HAVE to go on every community to see what every single community says about something though. You can just have the couple communities you follow and check those. Likely there will just be a couple of big communities for each topic, not dozens. What might happen even is that you have certain instances specializing in certain topics. You might have left wing and right political instances for example, so you’d just check the 1-2 instances you follow.
Each instance would effectively become analogous to the old time forums.
Like I said though, there is also the possibility of merging content from different instances into a single page.