The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
You don’t have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅
But then there would be my tomatoes and the ones at each of my local grocery stores. Am I supposed to go get some from everywhere to enjoy tomatoes?
I go to two different grocery stores to get different vegetables because they have varying quality. For example, if I want tomatoes I go to store 1 and for onions I go to store 2. For carrots I go to either because they are fine at both.
So if two instances have tomato, onion, and carrot magazines/communities with similar quality patterns I might want to sub tomatoes at one, onions at the other, and carrots at both.
I just want an easier way to find all of the instances that have onions so I know what I might be missing at the local farmer’s market. Or find out that a new farmer’s market opened up!
It seems to me like there are 5 places the grocery store has tomatoes and and you need to check all 5 places before you know which place you should buy from. Then, maybe next time you’re at the grocery store, a different spot will have the better tomatoes and there are also 3 other new tomato stands in the store.
I’m definitely grateful for lemmy or kbin or mastodon or wherever the fuck I am right now as a reddit replacement, but this shit is confusing and annoying
I think the idea is people coming from a grocery store where all the fruit and vegetables were centralized in a “produce” section and then going to a Farmers’ Market and complaining that multiple stalls sell tomatoes and having to visit all of them to go tomato shopping.
At least that’s what I’m getting from these comments. I’m new here too, and getting used to it, but I get a Farmers’ Market vibe.
That’s a good perspective. Thank you for that. I’ll try to look at it like a farmer’s market from now on
For real, man. Homegrown tomatoes are fkn delicious.
Ever had dry farmed tomatoes? They’re like regular homegrown tomatoes but with twice the flavor.
What’s dry farming? Limiting water supply?
Essentially no watering. Only works with places with some mild temps, a 20 inches of rain per year, and some morning fog etc.
Where appropriate climate and soil conditions exist, growing dry-farmed tomatoes can be a good option for specialty crops growers. Dry farming generates an intensely flavored crop much prized by consumers and retailers.
A limited number of geographic regions are suited to dry farming, which requires adequate winter rainfall and—in the case of annual crops—a summer-time marine influence that generates cool mornings and warm afternoons. These climatic conditions, combined with careful soil preparation, appropriate variety selection, adequate plant spacing, and vigilant weed control are all required to successfully produce dry-farmed crops.
No offense, but you’re argument reveals that you’re thinking of all this fedi stuff as a service provided to you, like Facebook or reddit.
It is not. It is people like you and me creating and taking part in them.
These tools are BRAND NEW. It is likely the creators of one didn’t know about the other(s) at that time. This is US doing all this for US not a corporation making tools to suck people in to advertise to.
Not gonna crit you further. You probably don’t remember the internet before the corps ruined it.
Can you be any more condescending? Op has a point, it is not ideal to have the same community on different instances. There is no need to be a dick about it.
Sorry, didn’t mean to be dickish. I just reread my post. Saying “sounds like you’re expecting a corporate experience” was an observation is not an insult.
Decentralized stuff is fundamentally different than centralized coordinates corporate stuff. Serious question, do you understand how it is that so many people can start so many similar communities?
It’s not the same community. It’s 5 different communities on 5 different instances that all happen to have the same name. It will be the owners of those communities to determine whether or not they want to consolidate.
Wait until they find out that there used to be hundreds of websites all talking about the same thing?
And it was magical.
Yeah, as someone who used to frequent car forums back in the day, one way I think about it is you might have Mazda, Subaru, Ford, Chevy, etc specific forums. And they all had subsections devoted to suspension upgrades, with a lot of content that would look really similar to someone just getting into cars. But they also met the different needs of the different communities, and had their own vibes and culture.
Now imagine all those communities could interact with each other directly, and you end up with something like what we’re getting with the Fediverse.
Or maybe I’m just too hung up on analogies, idk.
Oh dude you just reminded me of the guitar tab websites. Those were fun and fucked up all at the same time.
There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.
You don’t have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.
I think there will probably be a natural selection of which one prevails. But each instances may have different rules and different mods. So follow and unfollow the few that have what you like. It would be nice in the future though to ability to create aggregate subs or find aggregate subs like a multi-subreddit for a given topic.
There are multiple communities because these are all different servers, which don’t coordinate community names with each other.
There are some feature proposals on the lemny issue tracker that try to address this issue in different ways…
This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.
If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don’t feel like you need.
Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.
Adding an edit as I’ve thought a bit more: I think it’s important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are ‘unlimited’ options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.
This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.
I think it’s lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you’d like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.
I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there’s less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can’t universally squat on a community name
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it’s necessary to consider the part after the “@” to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There’s no such thing as a community named “No Stupid Questions”, with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for “multireddit”-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.
There is no “the community”, though. These names don’t “belong” to any one specific group of people, there’s no “there can be only one” mandate.
As an example of why “there can be only one” is a bad thing, there’s /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn’t, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn’t like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got “taken over” by right wing moderators and those who weren’t of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community “Canada”?
You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the “real” community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.
But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it’s an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.
They’re different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you’re not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
For the record I don’t think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic
May be true, it doesn’t hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.
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Thanks for the link. Blocked him. I’m brand new here and still learning but that’s definitely the kind of shit I want to avoid.
have to
Why would you think that?
So? Reddit has about 10 sizeable Subs that are just a variation of “Ask Any and All Questions”. That’s not even counting speciality subs like “MedicalQuestions” or “ITQuestions” or “DermatologyQuestions” or “AskTrangender”. Or the different language ones like “FragReddit” (German). In the end 1-3 will become the major ones, all will be a bit different and everyone will find the ones they like most.
You have stepped through the Looking Glass, Alice. Welcome to the
MultiFediverse.No. You don’t have to. But if you want to throw a wide net and not just wind up with a singular place with a unified mentality, it’s good to have multiple places focused on the same topic. For perspective.
isn’t activitypub stuff basically open?
so you could create or comission your own platform/ interface that can synthesize posts from all sorts of places and could even do things about duplicates?thats the benefir of the open source data model and apis - someone can probabledevlop the features you want - eventually.
the current platforms probably all look a bit like pre existing forums / aggregators or social media . butthats just a starting pont, the future could be much weirder ways of compiling displaying and creating posts. and in theory it can all interoprate (within reason, and outwith federation blocks)
i probably have no idea what i’m talking about though . . . i’ve certainly not even queried a single activitypub api personally
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100% this
I don’t want to have to curate every part of my feed. I find myself missing r/All constantly while browsing the local pages.
There’s too many responsibilities on the user, which for some people is a huge plus, but for the average consumer is a huge drawback stopping them from joining a new platform.
FB and Twitter were flourishing for over a decade with me never being a part of it. I’m okay with Reddit flourishing without me, I’m happy where I am right now.
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I miss some niche subreddits but in general I appreciate the digital detox it forced upon me. I can live without these niche communities. It’s not like they provided me with much more than fun trivia or memes on topics I already dabble in either way.
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you fundamentally misunderstand lemmy. These are all independent communities, hosted by different admins.
Which is stupid.
And confusing
Not really, it’s just not Reddit
Of course you’re welcome to that opinion but it’s a fundamental design feature of the fediverse.
There’s no central point of control. Anyone can create an instance and create their own “No stupid questions” community.
There are obvious benefits if you’d care to consider them but if not it’s fine if the fediverse isn’t for you. There’s always reddit I guess.
There is nothing stopping the fediverse from checking with other instances to see if a name is already in use. That would be a pretty cool feature to avoid a whole bunch of duplication.
Yes there is.
It’s decentralised. There’s no central authority.
Even if lemmy imposed that restriction, you could just fork the code and remove it.
Wait, he’s got a point though: Why not something like this:
A user wants to create a new community. He enters a name, then the system checks and informs that “the fediverse already has a community by that name +here and +here.” The user may still create this same community on this instance - or he might say, hey cool thanks, and go subscribe to (one of?) the existing ones instead.
This would only help if people creating these communities were not aware that communities with the same name exist on other instances.
Even if this feature did discourage someone from creating a new community, some other fief lord would be along shortly to create it.
I did feel the same way about multiple communities initially, but now I’ve been here a while I realise that it’s just not a problem - just subscribe to all of them, that’s the solution.
I think over time some instances and some admins will become more popular, and weed out the rest.
To some extent perhaps but I don’t think that should be the objective.
Just subscribe to all the “no stupid questions” communities. It’s no big thing.
New ones get created all the constantly. Are they supposed to spend all their time monitoring every instance for new variants of a community?
