I may be just a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I think the duplicate communities thing will die down eventually. Natural selection will do it’s thing and we’ll all eventually settle in specific communities on specific instances.
Based on the nature of life itself all living things become specialized over time. This includes creatures, jobs, products, communities, etc. So what’s likely to happen is some communities will die out or be abandoned while others will thrive and yet others will simply become more specialized.
Hypothetical example: /m/gifs on Kbin might become the place to find perfect loops and high quality/serious stuff while /m/gifs on some other instance might become the place for animated silliness.
I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
I think “duplicated” communities is a problem even on a centralized service, to a lesser degree, since you can create a community with same intentions, but different names (e.g. c/video, c/videos). I’m also optimistic they will sort out with time
Agree, the fragmentation of communities is a stumbling block for adoption and for the coalescing of users to solidified groups that adopt identities and cultures. This is a huge advantage when looking at centralized systems like reddit. My hope is that there will be some version of natural selection but that it occurs sooner than later
One thing I’m worried about here with the duplicated communities though is the same thing that was happening on Reddit in the last couple years, new astroturfed communities popping up with a decided slant. Like how /r/economy came out of nowhere despite /r/economics being an existing huge subreddit, and /r/economy having a noticeable conservative bent. Lemmy doesn’t seem a ton more susceptible to it than Reddit was, but discovering new popular communities does seem to be very much a desired feature here.
I don’t think Beehaw has it figured out, but the idea of making signups more onerous definitely makes sense to limit bots, advertisers, and state actors.
I may be just a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I think the duplicate communities thing will die down eventually. Natural selection will do it’s thing and we’ll all eventually settle in specific communities on specific instances.
Based on the nature of life itself all living things become specialized over time. This includes creatures, jobs, products, communities, etc. So what’s likely to happen is some communities will die out or be abandoned while others will thrive and yet others will simply become more specialized.
Hypothetical example: /m/gifs on Kbin might become the place to find perfect loops and high quality/serious stuff while /m/gifs on some other instance might become the place for animated silliness.
I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
I think “duplicated” communities is a problem even on a centralized service, to a lesser degree, since you can create a community with same intentions, but different names (e.g. c/video, c/videos). I’m also optimistic they will sort out with time
Agree, the fragmentation of communities is a stumbling block for adoption and for the coalescing of users to solidified groups that adopt identities and cultures. This is a huge advantage when looking at centralized systems like reddit. My hope is that there will be some version of natural selection but that it occurs sooner than later
One thing I’m worried about here with the duplicated communities though is the same thing that was happening on Reddit in the last couple years, new astroturfed communities popping up with a decided slant. Like how /r/economy came out of nowhere despite /r/economics being an existing huge subreddit, and /r/economy having a noticeable conservative bent. Lemmy doesn’t seem a ton more susceptible to it than Reddit was, but discovering new popular communities does seem to be very much a desired feature here.
I don’t think Beehaw has it figured out, but the idea of making signups more onerous definitely makes sense to limit bots, advertisers, and state actors.