this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Well that is just like... your opinion man. Also i think that utopia looks kinda shit like dubai but with flying taxis.
World made it easy for tons of people to onboard onto lemmy. If there were no instances that made it easy for all the reddit refugees to find a home, it would be a lot emptier here imo. And of course people create communities on their instance.
I think it is a good thing that lemmy.world is huge, in my non programmer mind, it will prepare lemmy better for the next wave of new users, maybe that will be the time to onboard them onto different instances.
Thanks for all the memes though!
Agreed
There are two main issues with centralization on LW:
A detailed thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee that discusses the issue: https://lemmy.world/post/14728407
Agreed, and as I always say, I think they do a quite good job overall. At the same time, it would be better if communities could move away from LW as well, for reasons stated above
To point 1, like i said, next wave the user load should spread out over more instances, that would be nice if that could happen.
Point 2, i feel like these are just growing pains and it's not only a bad thing that these issues become visible now, these issues sure must be adressed if the lemmyverse grows bigger.
And yeah it would be nice if communities would be completely transferable in the future, i hope there is no technical impossibility here and it just takes time for this to happen.
The issue is that new joiners are probably going to move to LW, as most of the users and communities are there, and they might not completely get how federation works. So then LW would become even more centralized, in a chicken and egg way.
That's why I'm advocating for moving communities now, then the whole thing is more balanced.
That would be ideal, but Lemmy development usually takes time, and we should always be ready to have an influx of new users. Solving the issue ourselves has a higher and faster change of success than wait for the devs to update it, release it and then wait for all instances to upgrade.
Talking about upgrades, LW plans to skip 0.19.5 as their upgrades are always so impactful due to their size and the centralization of communities there, preventing a third of the Lemmy users to use new features.
Communities can already be migrated at the moment. I moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, left a pinned post on the old one, locked it, and everyone moved to the new one smoothly (we even have more activity now than back then).
I sometimes feel like some people in the LW staff are reluctant to close some of their communities, even if unmanaged, and that prevents communities on other instances from really getting popular.
Maybe enough people will recommend different instances this time? I wanted to sign up at .ml originally, but they didn't accept anything, lots of people recommended world. I think it was also on top of the join-lemmy site and the shuffling came later but i might remember that wrong. I didn't want to join an instance with a country code and also not a niche instance dedicated to a topic that i am not all that interested in (computers, startrek, furries, lgbtq...).
That issue is not being solved if nobody even realize it's there or is just being swept under the rug until it comes up with the next wave!?
All of us who are already on board can leave for a cutting edge instance. I think it's a good thing that they want to keep world stable and take their time.
What, like automatically transfer subscribers (and hopefully posts at some point) etc? I thought everybody needs to be on board and then do it manually?
As they should be, not just delete some community because some user claimed it was dead and unmoderated (like i saw you do recently with a community which had an active user as admin ;). If they just deleted those communities i guess you'd go at them again with the power trip accusations.
To me the biggest factor is some of the LW staff "name squatting" a topic rather than agreeing to redirect to active communities on the same topic.
Most of the users are unaware of most of the features. I met a year-long user the other day who had no idea they could import / export their settings. Also, that release has been out for 2 months and a half, 54% of the instances use it (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/versions ), including 7 other instances of the top 10 (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy )
No, to be honest having a look at the code I'm not sure we would ever get such a feature. Mastodon does not allow this kind of imports, and they are much more stable and mature than Lemmy. Maybe in 5, 10 years? So in the meantime, we can do it ourselves the way I described above.
That's interesting you mention this, because
I am never in favor of deleting any community, that's detrimental to the platform.
To add to that topic, I try to get people on Reddit to switch to Lemmy a lot (they are probably the biggest potential users we can get), and the first question they ask is "why are those communities empty? It looks like a ghost town".
Locking them down, and redirecting to active communities makes Lemmy look more appealing as a whole.
Power tripping definitely happens, for a lot of mod / admins. It's sad, but sometimes it's the main driver to a healthier community / instance, as the meme stated above.
Damn, that's a lot of text 😄
I have a feeling that LW staff would give a different reason for this. As they did with the community that you asked to be locked (not deleted, i misremembered this ;). And yes, that mod agreed and now the community is locked. That's great! But i won't hold it against world admins to not listen to people from other instances asking for communities to be locked, when the mods are still active users. If they did that i would have more of a problem with it. I think this turned out perfect? But if a mod doesn't want to oblige to your requests, then so be it, i think that is just fair.
Oh wow, i would have thought it would be more. I would like to be "up to date" and see all the images i uploaded and maybe delete some but i still i think it is a good idea that they are being cautious and i trust them on their judgement, i don't believe they refrain from updating for shady reasons or out of spite or whatever.
What does "other instances" mean in a federated context? I can use my LW alt, use it to post everywhere for a few weeks, am I now a local user?
I have another example for this !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz
From time to time, some LW users go to the LW to post. Then all of a sudden, the paradox of choice is there again, and it's less clear for everyone as well.
All of this while 2 of the 3 mods haven't been active for months, and the last one just popped back from a 2 months hiatus, preventing me from requesting the community.
That's what frustrating with the whole situation. Sometimes you also encounter name sitters such as https://lemmy.world/u/WandererLagomorph770
Have a look at that list of communities, and tell me this is not a name squatter.
There are a lot of abandoned instances. Actually, it's the other way around. Having a look at the stats, most of the populated instances are using 0.19.5 except LW, so it's 18k out of the around 50k monthly users which are held back.
To be honest, I even forgot the picture thing was introduced then.
It means that the instance admins have a higher responsibility towards their own users, mods and communities wishes.
Yeah well i don't think they should lock that community if the mod doesn't want it to be locked. Do you really think that would be right? Should i go and demand the solarpunk bird community to be locked because world's is more active? I think it'd be pretty bad if they did, not that i think they would. Also i don't think that user you called out is part of world's staff.
The paradox of choice is something you have deal with in the fediverse i guess, starts at choosing a server. I don't think it should be that big of a deal, as long as communities can be found from the instances internal search.
I still don't think they keep us from being upgraded to be mean.
It's up to debate, but to me if the mod isn't active for the community (e.g. posting regularly), they should ask for someone else to take up that role. And if nobody wants the role, and there is another active community to redirect too, it could be nice to lock the inactive community down and redirect to the active one.
I mod a few inactive communities (such as !harrypotter@literature.cafe ). If someone came to me and said "hey, we've been trying to get our own HP community active, you already have some people on yours, would you mind locking yours down as you don't seem to actively mod it, and redirect to ours?" I would definitely do it.
They are not, but at the same time the LW rules still allow them to namesquat that community.
For the instance, as long as you take the big ones (LW, lemm.ee, SJW, dbzer0, lemmy.ca, etc.), your experience will indeed be the same. To know which community to post too, this is a different story, and I've seen a lot of people telling me "I stay on Reddit because when I when to post about a topic, there's a clear community where to. On Lemmy, there are two or three active communities competing for the same topic, and it's just confusing". Of course we should keep different communities for different folks (no one would consider merging lemmy.ml communities with LW's), but we can also reduce the confusion for a few core topics that can help new joiners to get settled
They are not, but as I said earlier, LW is so large than they have to be extra cautious with their updates. If they would be 20% of the total Lemmy population, and 30 of the top 100 communities compared to now, they would probably be more at ease with "me can mess up a bit, it's okay". Having them as a cornerstone of the whole platform puts them constantly under the spotlight.
So i had another look. I think it's actually kinda crazy that you demand they should lock the dataisbeautiful community. The world one has a bunch of different users posting stuff to it, in the mander one it is 50% you. The mods are all active lemmy users, max three months since last comment (and we don't know when they last logged in to lemmy). You just claim it is an unmanaged community, but it looks just fine to me, no spam or whatever. And i don't agree at all that mods necessarily need to be actively posting into the communities they mod.
Quoting the quote where you mentioned me in that other topic
This does not apply to the world community, but i guess to the ones other than mander, ml and world:
The ml community is also not locked btw.
And i don't see how this could be fixed in the lemmyverse, having multiple communities for same topic? It is just part of how this works? It is also kinda easy to tell by these search results which communities might be active. And if you're interested in the topic, you'd subscribe to all of them (active ones). That's how it was a year ago too, when i looked for communities of my interest.
Honestly i understand you less after looking into it more. I mean i get the desire to spread out communities and i think it would be a good thing, but you can't just force your will onto other people and their ideas like that.
Well then we agree that it seems to be fine how they do it.