There absolutely needs to be a good way of finding communities here on lemmy, that would probably mitigate the problem a bit. I also like your sticky solution linking to similar communities, but it would be great if this happened automatically (or semiautomatically) when creating communities. As in: oh you are trying to create a "technology" community on your instance? Did you have a look at these ones with the same name on federated instances?
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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For what its worth I just spend this morning scraping a list of communities from the dozen largest Lemmy instances. ANd last night for no good reason other than it existed in Reddit, I created !lemmy411@lemmy.ca
Today's Lemmyverse Community Listing: https://lemmy.ca/post/612259
Love the idea. The drive.google.com is requesting permission, can you make it more open? Or paste it in a pastebin?
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I kind of like the idea for B. I'm not sure how to determine who the authoritarian figure would be to decide which 'cats' get to be in 'super cats'. Could some be excluded from the super group if they're pro-dogs/racist/etc? Is that against the whole idea?
Any update on this?
I couldn't find any comment from the devs. Was there one?
There is an extra problem, not mentioned here. When there are subs with the same name, it is actually impossible to know of choose which sub I am posting to. Like here.
I don't think this is an issue tbh.
The full name of a community includes the instance is running on. For this community here the instance is asklemmy@lemmy.ml . If you are referring to community you should include the instance to avoid confusion.
To the issue of duplicate communities: That issue existed on reddit too. Communities with slight variations in the name always existed. Sometimes the owners of some variation of the community just decided to forward their users to a "main community". Sometimes multiple communities coexist. I believe that in most cases a certain "main community" will establish itself as the one that the majority just accepts as the "real deal" because it has the most activity and the best moderation policies.
I think you've got it. It's only a problem that exists when communities are first starting. The best version will win out eventually, or a balance will emerge. Sometimes one will end up as a meme- or image-heavy forum, while the other one becomes primarily discussion focused.
Two perspectives, Viewer and Poster. Posters create new threads, Viewers view and possibly comment.
Two access methods, direct and indirect. Direct means entering a specific community. Indirect means browsing content which is aggregated in your stream from all your subscriptions.
Viewer, indirect: It does not matter wether your cat content comes from 1 or 100 individual sources *, it gets aggregated anyways. **Super communities can not help with this use case.
Viewer, direct: If a Viewer visits communities directly then yes, fragmentation is an issue. Super communities can help with this use case.
Poster, direct: The only access method for Posters, since they cannot create content indirectly but have to decide where to create it, and wether only in one, or in multiple communities **. Posters have to make that decision regardless wether the communities are grouped to a super community or not. **Super communities can not help with this use case.
In conclusion, community grouping can improve the experience for direct Viewers, but has no effect on indirect Viewers or Posters. We can also differentiate between server-side grouping (which seems to be the proposal) and user-side grouping (aking to multi-subreddits: users compile arbitrary lists of subscriptions into one, new feed).
*) Depends on how exactly aggregation is implemented. It could be that posts in small communities with less absolute traction have a lesser chance to be streamed. Or it could be the relative size of the community is accounted for. How to know?
**) Multiposts in similar communities can create another, related issue for Viewers indirectly browsing content, as they now see duplicates in their stream.
Personally I feel the entire point is it should be done like that. Like it was in the 90s. Every little cats community can be out there and independent from each other; communities, identities and administration can remain separate. For discoverability, rather than make it part of the platform which would eventually induce dark incentives towards the kind of consolidation that happened with Reddit in the first place, well, why not also do it like back in the 90s? There used to be the webdirectories, as well as the webrings (in Yahoo, Geocities, etc) that served as an independent discovery system.