Why Lemmy/Kbin are fundamentally broken (and how to fix them)

I don't understand. Reddit is exactly the same, it has thousands of different subs, many with overlapping content, many duplicated because someone didn't like the mods, yet I don't recall people saying reddit was broken because of it.

Why is Lemmy suddenly broken just because people naturally do the same reddit thing here?

Can't we just ask for a feature like multi-reddit that lets users aggregate different subs into the same feeds (like sort of collections) instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

Tags is a cool idea to help users find posts or communities on specific topics.

But taking away the different communities on the same topic is misunderstanding one of the key benefits of the fediverse over Reddit. I might want to talk about horses in a different way, with different people, operating under different rules, to the way others might want to talk about horses. The fediverse allows that, without having RealHorseTalk and RealRealHorseTalk nonsense.

Better UI and categorisation tools, yes. That'll help make sense of this for new users. But don't take away an actually positive aspect of the fediverse just to make it look more like Reddit.

Better solution would be to introduce community collections. I'd love to be able to group "gaming" communities from 5 different servers into one and explore it that way.

So, let's say you have a community about video games, and they tag themselves #Gaming. Then you have another community about video games, and they tag themselves #Games. Then you have a community about boardgames, and they tag themselves #Games. Then you have a community about tabletop RPGs, and they tag themselves #Gaming.

Now you've got two communities discussing the same topic in different places, and both of them are also getting posts about similar but unrelated activities shoved down their throats.

While OP has a point regarding a potential problem, the term 'fundamentally broken' is an absolute overstatement. At most, it could be stated that Lemmy/kbin might not be feature complete yet. And i expect, given the crowd sourced nature of it, that it will dynamically evolve into our users combined needs. No need to abandon it!

Now about the actual point: as others have mentioned, the way Lemmy handles multiple subs on same topic on different instances is good. The communities are easily differentiable via the instance prefix, and if i want both, i can simple subscribe to both, and will see the posts from both in my feed.

I don't like the tag idea, because such global consensus about what e.g. a horse is might work for a horse, but not for other terms like 'politics', which would depend on the jnstance. If i see a politics sub on an italian instance, i expect it to be mostly about italian politics and related world politics, which is good.

I would have thought "community groups" is the fix - let people group communities together, so you could have all Pokémon or Star Wars communities grouped or, simply, all communities of the same name/purpose.

Works fine as just a private consolidated feed, might get trickier if these were made public, so other people could subscribe to your curated group, because you'd then end up with dozens of pretty much the same thing.

edit: so the private feed would, essentially, be something like Mastodon's lists, for example.

The part about instances moderating content they receive seems like an issue. Every instance, including small ones run by one person, will go from moderating their local communities to basically moderating every community anyone on the server reads, which probably includes a lot of very large and active ones (larger than any current ones, since they'll basically be several existing communities combined).

when a potential new user comes to join the platform, they’re overwhelmed by the choices. And instead of having one big community of connected instances, we have multiple redundant communities which aren’t interacting at all

the user will just gravitate to whichever community has the most activity. that's what I did - I had subscribed to a bunch of news related communities so my "Subscribed/New" feed has new content. and then yesterday I went through and unsubscribed from the dead/inactive communities and noticed no difference in my feed.

this really just feels like a solution in need of a problem

Yeah the fragmentation isn't great, but people usually flock together. For instance, you have multiple subreddits for franchises like Pokemon, but over time people will only use the most active or the most specific sub (each PKMN game has its dedicated sub). Plus I believe I've read somewhere that communities could be merged in the future. So if we don't have two or more stubborn mods, that don't want to work together everything should be fine, probably.

Local communities have a purpose. I live in Northwest Arkansas, a vibrant, slightly more liberal region of the state. I can envision a hyper local instance for all things NWA. For example, a community on trails and trail riding/hiking would focus on the area’s trail system instead of the general topic.

Now, I might want to subscribe to both the NWA trails community as well as the mote general purpose “global” trails community. So, having them distinct in some way is helpful.

Maybe it makes sense to have local communities that function as “satellites” of the global community of the same name. In this model, I could post to NWA trails and optionally choose to have my post broadcasted or cross-posted to the global community.

In the USENET era, we solved the problem with a hierarchical name space. Hierarchies are great, as long as everyone agrees on the structure. The problem is that most hierarchies are completely arbitrary. We would need a consensus group, like the Big-8, ICANN, or IETF that could manage the global community name space. This shouldn’t stop a competing group from standing up a separate, independent global namespace, though.

Maybe the ETA of the global namespace is past. Maybe there are better ways to achieve these goals today.

The article sort of misses the point, and their example illustrates it perfectly. On one instance you're talking about horses with a community for animal lovers. The other, with a community of transportation enthusiasts. There will be some overlap, but I expect the theme of most discussion to be very different. I think having separate communities is actually a good thing. It would be nice to have some way to merge on an individual level if I want to scroll through cute horse pictures and talk about riding to work. Some sort of multireddit type feature might allow that.

I disagree with the premise of this post. People who want the experience this post describes can get it already using Mastodon and various workalikes such as Pleroma.

Like a subreddit, the purpose of a Lemmy community is not just to label posts as related to a certain topic or distribute moderation duties, but to build a community with its own set of inside jokes, shared wisdom, history, norms, and rules. To give an example, pictures of swans are welcome on /c/pics or /c/birding, but at /c/geese swans are the enemy. Hiss!!!

Sometimes communities fork because groups within them have incompatible preferences. That's a feature, not a bug.

I do, however think community migration between servers, initiated by the moderators should be a thing. As anyone who's been on Mastodon for a while knows, servers shut down, or sometimes develop other issues that mean some people would prefer to be elsewhere.

I've been thinking of and experiencing the community duplicates, finding multiple communities with the same name and being unsure which to pick. I usually end up picking one with most users and/or content but there's always doubt, am I picking the best one?

I really like the idea of posting to tags and the tag gets aggregated across instances and you can view all the posts. I don't know enough about the fediverse yet to know if this is a good idea or possible even. But I'd definitely like some sort of transition to having easier to access content and more ease in finding new topics/communities/tags.

Thanks for this post.

Weren't tags already proposed and being evaluated?

Nah that's Twitter and I don't like Twitter