I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.
So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That’s very limiting.
Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I think the fracturing of communities will sort itself out with time.
Even within reddit there has always been multiple communities per niche before one floats to the top.
I think the main issue with that is reducing the barrier between instances so that its easier for people to find the large communities
I agree with this. I’m not worried about that fracturing because it’s also pretty common on reddit. IE: the r/nba sub alone has more than a couple of spin-off subs.
The difference is that you can just sub to them all easily and get all their content. It’s much harder on the Fediverse because you need to go to a lot more effort to do so and there is a lot of junk communities with few posts out there. There are also complete nutjobs running some of them that you ordinarily wouldn’t want to interact with either.
Now if there was a clean, easy and fast way to sift though all the crud across multiple servers at once that would make a huge difference.
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I wrote a response to the first part yesterday.
Absolutely agree that large user bases have distinct advantages. It’s gonna take a bit to get there though.
I’m new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one “this is my <hobby> feed” so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you don’t lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a “magazine” on here it’d be really nice to collate a number of magazines I’m interested in into a “rack” similar to a multireddit.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a “Book” or “Literature” tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
@hllywluis @BobQuasit @MentallyExhausted
Yes, for browsing and up/downvoting it could be totally transparent. When you want to make your own thread it could just have you select the specific magazine/commumity from a drop down.
edit: even commenting on existing threads would be totally seamless.
I’m pretty sure there has been mention, either by the Lemmy devs on a post here or on the projects GitHub repo, about adding a feature analogous to the multireddit feature on that site. It’s definitely a feature I would appreciate, and would go hand in hand with what you’re describing as well.
Perhaps there could be a way that the moderator of mutiple ‘Books’ magazines could agree to mutually federate (assuming their instances are federated) in some way.
I guess I’m too dumb to still understand how the communities work. I am using kbin, and it seems like magazines are the equivalent of a sub-reddit? I subscribed to a couple, but I guess there are multiple of the same magazines which are about the same thing?
There are many instances (“servers”) of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of “magazines” and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.
Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance “foo.” Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance “bar” and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won’t see it. The community is effectively split — often into more than two parts.
This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit’s. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn’t intuitive to newcomers.