As some of you may know, !wholesome@reddthat.com is now more active than this community. Reddthat is a nice instance, and having the community there allows us to spread the communities across the different instances.

As it is usually easier for people to subscribe to only community, we are thinking about creating a pinned post here, pointing to !wholesome@reddthat.com, and lock the community.

If needed, the community can always be unlocked in the future.

Examples of other communities doing the same

  • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    I prefer multiple redundant communities for a few reasons.

    If one is on an instance I’ve blocked (not in this case) it cuts off the discussion entirely. Like if the municipality and other communities on .ml never had redundant communities elsewhere I wouldn’t see any of it.

    Moderation can make engagement unfun on some instances.

    It does increase crossposting and redundancy. Piefed currently merges comments of crosspoats which is awesome and lemmy could in the future.

    So while I don’t oppose it in this case, the consolidation trend seems to be swinging to the opposite extreme from intentional fragmentation instead of just letting each community grow and fade out on their own.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      God I need thunder to have good piefed support. Every piefed app I’ve tried so far has given me trouble, but every passing day it becomes more clear my next instance should be piefed lol

    • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      Hello,

      Piefed currently merges comments of crosspoats which is awesome and lemmy could in the future.

      The issue is that at the moment, Lemmy still does not support this, and there’s no clear timeline on when Lemmy 1.0 will release ( https://voyager.lemmy.ml/ shows it running, but it still seems like it’s being tested)

      instead of just letting each community grow and fade out on their own.

      The other issue is that communities tend to not fade out on their own if they have a high enough amount of subscribers, even if those are not active users. The two !wholesome communities here are a bit of an example

      • LadyButterfly has been posting daily on the Reddthat one for weeks
      • The LW one is still used by people, either unaware of the Reddthat one, or thinking that they will have a larger audience on a community with more subscribers

      There are communities where the instances have been shut down for years, but people still post there because they show a high number of subscribers: https://lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film

      Lemmy.film shut down 2 years ago, posts made there never federate anywhere.

      Finally, everyone is still able to create their own community on a topic if they wish to. Past experiences just show that usually there’s poster burnout happening after a few weeks being the only poster on a community, and that it’s usually easier to join an existing community.

      Poster burnout is regularly discussed on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip for people interested.

      • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        The LW one is still used by people, either unaware of the Reddthat one, or thinking that they will have a larger audience on a community with more subscribers

        Or like me they subbed to more than one of the same community across instances. It shouldn’t be a competition.

        Past experiences just show that usually there’s poster burnout happening after a few weeks being the only poster on a community, and that it’s usually easier to join an existing community.

        Then the community fades away and that is what I would prefer to happen instead of formally closing and moving. A post about the prolific posters switching over worked well for the migration to piefed as far as I can tell.

        • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
          21·
          3 days ago

          Or like me they subbed to more than one of the same community across instances. It shouldn’t be a competition.

          It’s not a competition, it’s about keeping an activity level in one place. It’s indeed easier to stay subscribed to several communities, but once you start posting you always double guess which one you should post to ( https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/ ).

          Then the community fades away and that is what I would prefer to happen instead of formally closing and moving.

          As I said, it never really fades away. There was a post on https://lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film this week (https://lemmy.world/post/36120606?scrollToComments=true ) , that person will probably never get any comment there because it’s not federated, but they have no way to know about that.

          Then if someone shows up to give the platform a try, they have a look at a community like !lego@piefed.social that barely has any posts, when !lego@piefed.social has activity daily. They think the platform is dead, and leave.

          A post about the prolific posters switching over worked well for the migration to piefed as far as I can tell.

          Depends on the community. !movies@piefed.social is indeed more active, but you still have people posting to !movies@lemmy.world because they think it has a bigger audience. Same for !lego@piefed.social and !lego@lemmy.world. The only ones where there really a move were the communities on lemm.ee, as the instance shut down.

          • hzl@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            I know you’ve probably gotten this feedback a lot, but this whole crusade of yours of trying to reduce decentralization on Lemmy is really counterproductive. If Lemmy users wanted centralization they wouldn’t be on a decentralized protocol.

          • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            It’s not a competition, it’s about keeping an activity level in one place. It’s indeed easier to stay subscribed to several communities, but once you start posting you always double guess which one you should post to ( https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/ ).

            This sounds like you’re in favor of keeping everything in a single community i.e. consolidation despite claiming to be against it.

          • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Allowing posts to be created for communities on shut down instances is something that should be solved with a technical solution.

            Discovery of communities is a much bigger issue than which community someone happens to land on to look for activity. Once people get a sub list going they don’t have easy ways to know new communities are being created. Even if they browse All they might be sorting for popularity. If they use Local they never see stuff from other instances. If they look at an instance they won’t see content from defederated instances. They also won’t see the external content that nobody from that instance has subbed to.

            Having more than one community with the same name and topic is something that could be addressed by encouraging people to find similar communities. The easiest would be an indicator that other federated communities with the same name exist that they could review and maybe click the join button. The end result would be more people finding out about similar communities across instances and far less need for crossposting to get more eyeballs.

            As a side note, large instances are preferred by users who mostly view because the more people means more federation since communities on other instances only show if someone subs. That means the big instances are the ones that will grow because they already show most of the content by default.

            • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              Discovery of communities is a much bigger issue than which community someone happens to land on to look for activity. Once people get a sub list going they don’t have easy ways to know new communities are being created. Even if they browse All they might be sorting for popularity. If they use Local they never see stuff from other instances. If they look at an instance they won’t see content from defederated instances. They also won’t see the external content that nobody from that instance has subbed to.

              Indeed. Piefed now pulls data from !newcommunities@lemmy.world to monitor new communities, and there are discussions to implement a way to ingest information from lemmyverse as well ( https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/4-developers/topic/Lemmyverse.20Community.20Discovery/near/4966 )

              I’ve been posting a few communities to !newcommunities@lemmy.world in the last few days to make use of that feature.

              The easiest would be an indicator that other federated communities with the same name exist that they could review and maybe click the join button.

              This is already here in Piefed (right side of the screen, “Related Communities”):

              As a side note, large instances are preferred by users who mostly view because the more people means more federation since communities on other instances only show if someone subs.

              I am aware, but that should only be a concern for user concentration, not community concentration.

              • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                Isn’t the related Communities something that is manually added to the right hand menu?

                I was thinking of something that would be next to the link name above the post, where it would be a heads up that a community exists on another instance with the exact same name. Automated and noticeable even if the sidebar isn’t showing due to being on mobile or not having the web browser wide enough.

                Either piefed.world doesn’t support images or I need to turn something on or I would post an image to show what I mean. It would be something in addition to related communities, which is neat, but not based on exact matches.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        The issue is that at the moment, Lemmy still does not support this…

        A note to think about for the future: at what point do we start treating Lemmy as the disabled cousin that needs extra assistance to do even the most basic tasks? I cannot think of a single concession that has ever once been offered to PieFed to “compete” with Lemmy - every single step that it has ever taken it has EARNED its reputation, both good and bad, for being new but (relatively speaking) feature-complete, and for adding new features at what seems like a break-neck pace, which I can only hope does not entirely exhaust its main developers, especially when the project still has so very little funding support.

        If you are worried that Lemmy is too centralized, then perhaps move this community to a PieFed instance? PieFed helps to support decentralization, whereas migrating to any Lemmy instance merely postpones the issue to have to once again be revisited later on, when Lemmy is even further behind and PieFed even more further ahead than it is now.

        I am glad that Lemmy exists. I am even more glad that PieFed does. I use both on a weekly basis. I hope both will continue to exist. But regarding the issue of “centralization”, as with nearly all other issues, one of them has a clear and definite edge over the other…

    • gkak.laₛ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      I too came here to say ~this! Having only one community takes away some of the benefits that decentralization provides; meanwhile, similar communities can just link to each other in their sidebar

      • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        similar communities can just link to each other in their sidebar

        Linking to each other in the sidebar doesn’t really solve the issue

        • most of the people don’t read the sidebar
        • quite a few apps don’t make is easy to see the sidebar (or sometimes don’t show it at all)
        • people still want to post once, and be done with it
        • gkak.laₛ@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago
          • Pinned comment then 😕
            • In any case, it’s something that needs to be solved with a UX feature (e.g. how Piefed does it already (?)), not by changing how we use the whole network
          • People can still post in only one community if they want to

          Having to look at a sidebar, a pinned comment, or an automated DM, is way better that having a single point of failure for our discussions which can be taken down by defederation, censorship, server data loss, etc; people who don’t care (or don’t know) about those, can just subscribe to only one of the communities and… just see fewer posts 🤔

          If we just host all the communities on one instance, we’ll just be making a new Reddit

          • LadyButterfly she/her@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPMEnglish
            6·
            3 days ago

            Thanks for your perspective! I agree we don’t want to be reddit. I moderate a few comms and IME pinned comments get totally missed. I’ve had issues receiving DMs a few times so I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it by DM. The idea of decentralisation is spreading it over the fediverse, not just on one instance. Reddthat isn’t the primary instance so I think we’d be ok. I do totally see your concerns about censorship etc.

          • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
            6·
            3 days ago

            If we just host all the communities on one instance, we’ll just be making a new Reddit

            This is kind of what is happening with Lemmy.world: https://piefed.zip/communities?search=&home_select=any&subscribe_select=any&topic_id=0&feed_id=0&language_id=0&instance=&sort_by=active_weekly+desc

            You can see that the vast majority of the communities are hosted on LW.

            Moving the active community to another instance (Reddthat) is a way to ensure the platform is more reliant. And should Reddthat go down, we could just reopen this one and discuss here where to go next.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            PieFed has a number of options that support this, including:

            1. showing the side-bar text below each and every single post
            2. combining together all comments across all cross-posts regardless of which communities are involved or which instances those are on
            3. combining together multiple communities into one “Topic” (provided by instance admin) or “Feed” (these are user-customizable and even shareable!)

            The only down-side is that I think atm none of these are supported by its brand-new API, so apps like Voyager cannot take advantage of them yet, and are limited to the same experience that you have with just basic Lemmy, but even that is only a temporary issue as PieFed zooms ahead with adding new features practically weekly.

            image

  • Ice@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 days ago

    I’ve no issue with pinning a post & pointing to another community, but don’t lock this one. It feels antithetical to the idea of the fediverse.

  • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    Do it! Didn’t know the community and just subscribed. The more we can distribute across the threadiverse, the better.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 days ago

    Tbh - I’m lazy and just browse the Local feed. I started out subscribing to communities but quickly realized there’s not enough content to really support that model here yet (or you have to subscribe to a ton of communities).

    I suppose I could switch back to subscribing if Lemmy ever gets as big as Reddit was…

    …or if Lemmy.world ever gets sparsely populated enough that I get bored…

  • NightFantom@slrpnk.net
    31·
    3 days ago

    Personally I think reddthat is too close a nod to reddit, which means issues (because wanting to distance from reddit later, I don’t think there’s going to be legal issues). Otherwise assuming the same admins and such, all the same for me, I get them both in my feed at the moment.