What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it’s not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.
Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case “communities” would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.
Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.
A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there’s so many categories that could be applied to each.
What are your thoughts?
I think the main point of decentralization is to spread the burden of hosting around so that no individual has control of the system. I think having themed servers like what you’re suggesting would aid in discoverability of different communities, but the downside is that that would mean individual servers would have monopolies on certain subjects.
Exactly. Also, people might not want their handle being associated with a specific niche hobby they have, though they might be there a lot/all the time (e.g. I don’t want to be “ewe@hentainsfw”, but I sure as shit am going to be spending a lot of time there).
I kind of feel like it would be best if we had some “user” instances that are nice and always up and most of the communities lived on “community” instances either grouped or just spread out. That way if any single community gets too big on an instance, it doesn’t necessarily bog a bunch of users down as well (e.g. all the users on lemmy.ml that are hamstrung by being on the overloaded hardware on that instance).
Over on Mastodon I’m at mastodon.world purely because it’s the most generic sounding instance and I don’t particularly want to have my whole identity to be defined by where I live or the operating system that I use or whatever
I think that right now there are so many users coming in that it’s natural we will se a lot of duplicate communities in different instances. I think once things stabilize those communities can start merging in the “correct” instances. All the new people are new, and don’t really fully understand the concept- the are looking for a Reddit alternative. Once more people start to grasp the concept, I think we’ll see some shuffling around of users and communities to places where they fit better.
I think the documentation needs to get updated to be shorter and more concise, and also to try to impart “the way this is supposed to work” to the user, which I think it currently doesn’t (or if it does, it doesn’t do it in the earlier sections of the documentation).
Hopping between instances would have to be simplified significantly.
I’m currently working on a Lemmy mobile client and have implemented multi-accounts until it’s easier to do this. Basically you can make multiple accounts on different instances and aggregate the data from them all into a single feed. It doesn’t currently prioritize posting from specific accounts (you just select a primary)–I’m trying to figure out a good way to go about doing it so you can section things off 👀
Why do you need multiple accounts on different instances. You can have an account join a community on a different instance.
Same reason people have multiple accounts on other sites. You don’t always want your comments on local news to intersect your comments in a professional community or your comments on a game site. Storing them on other instances is another small layer of security.
How? I know I can follow a community but I can’t get a general feed of that instance. That’s the issue they’re solving
That’s cool. Unfortunately, I browse on desktop.
Not necessarily! I’m doing it in Flutter which can do desktop and web export (though web doesn’t feel native).I only specifically called out mobile since that’s what I’m targeting, but nothing stops be from putting out a desktop client
I hope by client you mean website.
I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I’ve never felt the need to hop between instances.
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.
Exactly, it’s really inconvenient right now. And it’s really important for the usability of what OP suggested.
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
And I highly disagree with only being important at the start. It’s a big hurdle that stifles growth right now and in the future.
Agreed, what needs to happen is an option that allows users to follow links from foreign instances in their home instance seamlessly. I have to imagine with the ramped up amount of development in lemmy that some of the devs must be working on it.
There are changes to that being discussed on the project GitHub right now. Hopefully positive change is coming
You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed
I never claimed otherwise.
No, that’s not right You can follow any community from any instance with your account, doesn’t matter where you registered your account. I just subscribed to https://beehaw.org/c/programming from lemmy.pt user account
this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn’t work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com
Read what I wrote, please.
While I agree it can be made easier, all you have to do if you’re from another instance is copy the url and paste it into your search bar to open it via your local instance.
That’s more of the interface you’re using a fault for not interpreting links correctly - it should be obvious that url/c/communityname should be interpreted as a community, just as !communityname@instance.org (right now jerboa is interpreting it as an email address) should also be interpreted as one, and if you remove the ! It should be interpreted as a username.
But most interfaces are open source, so give them time and someone (maybe even you) can submit a pull request that fixes it. That’s the beauty of open source - in time the bugs get ironed out because it’s a collaborative effort.
Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.
Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)
This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.
On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.
You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.
Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribersClick it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”
Done
Jesus Christ. I’m well aware of how you can subscribe to other instances. This is about convenience, with problems arising from situations like I described above.
Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.
There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.
At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.
If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can’t follow that link conveniently if you’re from another instance.
I saw that something like !programming@beehaw.org should work. It doesn’t work for me now though
That’s the string you need to put in the search and go through there. Clunky and inconvenient.
The funny part is that the search also returns posts where that link works, but don’t know what the issue here is. Regardless, copy+pasteing a universal link should be an easy thing to do and not require manual typing.
Edit: Okay, so to do those links you have to type it out like you would a reddit link:
[!programming@lemmy.ml](/c/programming@lemmy.ml)which results in !programming@lemmy.mlSo it’s actually the /c/programming@Lemmy.ml link that make it works like federation, so the ‘!’ has no purpose? It’s weird, I imagined it like @ and # at other platforms, and actually at lemmy’s GitHub page readme you can see they mention the tagging just like that, like it works the same as other platforms. What are we missing here hahaha
I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance.
On lemmy:
- Click ‘Communities’ (top left menu)
- Search using the search box (top right)
- Select ‘Communities’ from the drop down (top left)
- Make sure to toggle ‘All’ (*not *‘Subscribed’ or ‘Local’).
This will show you communities matching your search term from all instances*.
You can then subscribe to communities regardless on which instance they live and use them seemlessly, regardless of wether they are local or not.
*) It will show you communities matching your search term from all instances, if your instance has already discovered that community.
If it has not, it shows ‘No Results’. You can force it by some exclamation mark shenanigans which I haven’t understood well enough to explain. After that, your instance knows about that community in the other instance and will show it in future search results. I think as soon as one person from your instance force-discovers a community from another instance, that community becomes searchable for everyone on your instance.
The asterisk is the problem, IMO. There’s even a (I consider it a) bug where you have to deselect “Communities” from your search and choose “All” if you want to directly search for a community by its global name. Probably some interaction with global names and URLs, but it is a bit unintuitive.
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
I know. We all know.
Convenience is the issue here. You can’t directly go to an instance and start subscribing, you need to take unnecessary detours.
…which would be perfectly fine if we had a better search functionality.
If I search for something I’m interested in in some consolidated place (preferably directly from my lemmy instance or app), and it always finds what I want, and I can always subscribe to it, and links always work for it… then I won’t care about going directly to an instance to subscribe.
Having the ability to link your account to different instances might be a way to solve that, or you have the ability to keep accounts separate depending on the instance. Right now we can link specific communities from other instances to another instance which is great, but being able to switch instances easily from one master account would be pretty great
I think it will more of less follow that path naturally in the years to come, if it ever catches on. You can already see this happening with some instances (ie lemmy.ca mostly devoted to canadian topics, etc)
You have to remember that the amount of lemmy servers exploded in the past week or so. We’re pretty much figuring this out collectively
I agree. I think it’s going to be a bit of column A and a bit of column B. There will be the large general instances. Along with more regional and topical instances like feddit.de and programming.dev. Then a whole bunch of small instances that represent the long tail.
waveform.social is handling a lot of music-making topics. I think this is better than simply being region based. I understand the need for communities of different languages but I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions. Instances based on similar interests makes the most sense to me.
I don’t really understand the need for ones specific to different english-speaking regions
Makes perfect sense for regional events. This can be anything like weather, disasters, military excercises, cultural or sports events, regional politics, infrastructure projects, astronomy …
On my local subreddit, I was able to check what that noise was that I just heard, where all the emergency vehicles are racing towards, or follow hilarious regional stories.
Of course, for non-regional topics like music (unless it’s a regional event) I’d go to a non-regional sub or community.
Ah yeah that makes sense! I guess I never really clicked with that side of reddit but I can see why you would
It may make a difference in speed if you are closer to the actual server (IE, it’s in your country)
I don’t think that’s much of a concern for this type of web browsing. Sure gaming and anything else where ping matters is going to be greatly improved by being closer to a server but considering you can ping pretty much anywhere in the world from anywhere else in the world in under half a second I don’t see proximity to the server being that important for something like Lemmy.
@_finger_
We can have both generic instances and instances around a particular topic.We already have a few lemmy dedicated to a particular community like latte.isnot.coffee and startrek.website
This is good but at the moment the user base isn’t big enough to support splitting interests like that.
AI and machine learning tech instance over here looking for members. ran themed communities BEFORE reddit and slashdot, doing it again.
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”.
But you don’t have to create accounts on multiple instances. You can subscribe, post, and mod communities on other federated servers.
Then what happens when the owner of the giraffe instance goes all Spez on us?
Too much control is a bad thing. Let people spread those communities across all instances, otherwise I’ll be asking:
How am I to live without my giraffes?!
What about when the owner of the general purpose instance closes the whole instance over some BS in the WhyIsThisIllegal community and now your girrafe gifs are collateral damage? You going to stick your neck out them then?
Of course I won’t, but, the beauty of this is that you can just create another community in another instance. That way, my giraffe viewing party continues no matter where they reside.
But then what’s the point of separating them into instances in the first place?
The full list of federated communities is getting too big to just scroll and find things, especially since I can’t sort by name. I may not know what community name to search for. There’s a lemmy.studio instance that someone started for music production topics. I can go list communities in that instance to see what I didn’t realize I wanted to. It’s all six of one, half a dozen of the other. We have general purpose and focused instances now, so everybody is free to choose which they want.
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don’t think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.
My thoughts are what if the instance admins or mods are pricks? What if the instance shuts down?
I think the power of the fediverse is that there is redundancy with the communities on different instances. I feel like it’s a very human need to have everything neatly organized and in its place, but the internet is all about redundancy to ensure no single points of failure.
The fediverse mimics that by creating a web of small related communities, spread out over multiple instances, ran by different people, rather than a giant single community for one thing, on one instance, run by one person.
This was the case with Reddit as well, there were a lot of competing subs created due to shitty mods and rules so I don’t think it’d be much different in this case
There was a r/Yankees subreddit that had awful mods, so some people created r/Nyyankees and basically everyone moved there.
Presumably we’ll see that happen here as well, just potentially at a higher level, with instances rather than just communities.
I recently had to migrate my Mastodon account (home.social shut down, for… frankly frustrating reasons, but whatever). It was a pretty painful process, and none of my old toots exist as a result.
Hopefully we can figure this out with Lemmy, and in doing so, make migration painless enough that it can even be a common occurrence without a loss of data and content. Let’s not forget that one of the great things about Reddit is (was, I guess) that old threads still contain relevant information from passionate enthusiasts.
The real issue with instances shutting down is losing access to a user account. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there would be no way to login/recover an account from an offline instance.
Im honestly not entirely sure but that seems to be the case. Everyone is worried about mod power and decentralization but what about the power of instance owners over your own account? If I take the time to link a bunch of external communities to one instance, what happens if the instance goes down? All that work is gone
This is a good point and makes me wonder: is there any interest in running a personal instance that has no communities, just for the sake of being in control of your own identity? Would that even be an appropriate thing to do? And if so, how would you convince instances to federate with you if you have no content?
I think there are users self hosting for the purpose of control over their accounts and future features like bots.
I think (I heard) federating is opt-out, so unless instances specifically block you, you should be able to subscribe to anything anywhere. I will probably host my own instance if this is the case!
Being able to host a local instance seems like a really interesting approach to owning your own user data. Also a way to have a “blog” site like the relatively new profile posts on reddit.
That’s why I made an account in every instance I was interested in. I don’t cqre about my post history and what not and if i want to keep important info I’ll just save the page to my phone.
actually, the fediverse isn’t about redundancy. It’s about interoperability. Anyone being able to host their own “reddit” and still being able to communicate with the other “reddits”.
And the interoperability does bring resilience to the whole, because if a part of the system goes down (or goes to sh_t), then it’s only that part. But resilience is not quite the same as redundancy.
For redundancy you’re more looking at something like nostr, which functions with relays that can replicate the content being posted from all users of the network.
It creates redundancy though (in a bad way).
If I like formua1, which instance’s formula 1 community do I invest my time in? Instead of having 1 big F1 community, there will be 20 small F1 communities on 20 different instances. Subscribing to 20 communities on the same topic is silly, so I’ll have to somehow choose which F1 community to follow, and hope that I’m not missing good content from the other instances
I guess it’s the point of the fediverse as far as I understand. Kind of like being members of a bunch of old school forums. Unfortunately for me it’s not really what I’m looking for, and I like the unified aspect of reddit.
unified is nice, but if i’ve learnt anything over the past 9-10 years as a redditor, it means you’re at the mercy of admins and power mods. And because it’s become the go-to forum, it’s gotten so much attention from stealth marketers and bots (it’s hard not to unsee such posts once you learn to identify them), and karma removed trying to get the first witty remark in so it’ll get boosted up into the first top-level comment.
I kinda like the idea of a fediverse - it’s like a bunch of forums, but connected in a way that makes it so much easier to browse and read all of them, and doesn’t have the “centralisation of power” problem reddit has.
There’s nothing stopping you as a user from subbing to different communities on all of those instances to get a feed exactly how you like it.
The only difference would be that mods would belong to an instance themed around their interest with a like-minded admin for it. Also, you could pick more niche topics than you can now. Let’s say I’m into tech, but I don’t care about AI. I could go to the Tech themed instance, pick the news and linux communities from there, sub to those and get them in my feed while ignoring the ai related communities.
Unified is bad, always. If you need examples look at Windows, Android, iOS, Facebook, Amazon. Having a large selection roughly equal options promotes improvement AND cooperation. For example the Linux ecosystem is made up of hundreds of distributions that make a number of major choices about their systems but still allow the user to run the same software.
I disagree with the example of operating systems, unfortunately. Linux in my experience is just a worse user experience than either Windows or Mac OS. I know that probably won’t be a popular opinion around here, but I think that most users would agree as well. I’ve never used a linux OS that was intended for daily use that felt anywhere near as intuitive and easy to understand as Windows or Mac os.
I agree with you in general, but I think that what naturally tends to happen in markets is that one product gets improved to the point of being “the best” among its competitors and starts to really pull away, and once people are in they are in- most people don’t want to switch from the OS they have, to use your example, to another one unless their current OS is REALLY not doing something they need to be able to do to the point where switching would be easier.
A lot of platforms don’t start out intending to completely, 100% outcompete everyone else in their marketspace- I actually think Amazon is a great example of that. But once they start to take over, they don’t stop because the economic system we have makes it both very difficult to do so and also very lucrative to keep it going
And in some things, unity is kind of a good thing. I think Lemmy (and the rest of the fediverse for that matter) needs to figure out a way to centralize user logins- the fact that your instance could get taken down by its creators and lose your account altogether isn’t a great one. Yes, that’s a risk with a site like Reddit too, but it’s significantly less likely over there.
Maybe now but before it was big it definitely wasn’t. They had few employees and I’m sure the security wasn’t always as good as it is now there.
Decentralization is a key foundation of Bitcoin and other encryption things as I’m sure you know. What Lemmy needs is some basic infographics that explains everything visually. It’d be much easier to show or post an image then text about all this stuff.
I believe it would be better for everything to be spread out across instances so the impact is lessened when an instance goes down.
I agree that this seems to be the intent behind Lemmy. But, I also think that, right now, there is such a big influx of people that need accounts that we need to route them into as many instances as possible to keep server stress down. And that means that a lot of communities will be generalized by the new users.
I agree with other comment that this will likely happen organically over time. After things stabilize I think we’ll see communities begin to merge with identical or similar communities on other instances. And at that point server admins can start to take a bit more of a firm hand with their instances to try and do exactly what you’re describing, if that’s what they really wanted.
Would be nice if it was “divided” by user types too. Imagine a post about a new Marvel movie and you could view a shared comment thread but also filter to remove “marvel-fans”, or see only “cineasts”, without leaving the thread. Could lead to more bubbles, but could also make it really easy to see what other bubbles are thinking.
This would be a great feature, but if it ever gets implemented it would have to default to show all users. All the echo chambers we saw on “the old site” would probably be amplified here otherwise.
Would they give the ability to categorize or stereotype your own account? That could get messy ha
I suppose I was dreaming a little and imagining an open news-item id database (through manual or AI assisted tags) and any post and comment section about a news item (meaning different articles about the same subject) would become connected through that, so basically you could access different discussions about the same topic with a single click without leaving your original page. You wouldn’t have to categorize your comments when posting in the thread, you already do that by commenting from a specific community and having your comment be hosted there (basically imagine the same movie trailer posted on r/movies r/marvelstudios r/truefilm with different comment sections but you can switch between comment sections without leaving the page or view them all mixed together, or mixed by your preferences).
But yeah this idea probably comes with a million problems and to actually work (for more than just the same url/article) would require an open internet content databases more sophisticated than what even the big tech companies probably have internally right now.
I agree with what you’re saying. I’ve been contemplating back and forth about whether I should create a board game instant where you gather various board game discussions in the same instant.
I think it’s worth a try to see what happens, the concern of giving too much power to one instance for one topic is definitely valid but there’s also a benefit to it as well. Maybe Im looking at it wrong, in that the accounts are separated for each instance so for example if I wanted to only see posts from your board game instance I’d need to switch accounts rather than add all the communities to my .world instance which could get messy and not preferable in some cases. What might make it more effective and granular is the ability to add multiple categories or topic sections in your instance. For instance if you created a board games community in Lemmy.world there’s no ability to do this aside from creating separate communities for each subcategory of niche interests. So instead of being able to create Lemmy.world/boardgames/StarWars or Lemmy.world/boardgames/LOTR you have to create Lemmy.world/starwarsboardgames or Lemmy.world/lotrboardgames. which can get a bit messy.
I think, in time, those will come organically. Maybe those communities won’t be purpose built to be dedicated to a single topic, but despite federation I wouldn’t be surprised if instances popped up with rules about topics discussed. Still federated, but communities within themselves will be regulated somewhat.
I’m not sure how to feel about this, maybe it’s just the time I spent on reddit has jaded me, but there’s divisive topics that I’m not sure would do well if housed within the same instance without coming down to name calling and unsavoury behaviour. A reddit example, early days r/lowsodiumcyberpunk2077 and r/cyberpunk 2077, both held extremely differing opinions. An even worse example because politics got into the mix, r/thelastofus and r/thelastofus2. If mods keep on top of it with good rules set in place and are enforced, could be good.
I’m not sure either if forcing topics to newly deployed instances is a realistic path, either.
I don’t really think we need a rule to it. And honestly, what about when themes overlap? Do we get dividing communities just because?
Also, it would just promote an echo chamber like Twitter.
Communities does what you want already. In time, some will pop off and become the popular ones. Maybe some will be split because of users not agreeing with something, but that already happened on Reddit as well.
I agree with you. I think the best thing we can really do is just sit back and let things develop naturally
