When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It’s the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue with Lemmy/kbin not talking nicely, or is this how the Fediverse is?
Is it (at least theoretically) possible for me to post an article on https://kbin.social/m/startrek and have it automatically show up on https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek, or are they always going to be two separate communities?
Much like people making copycat subreddits. As apps become more popular, the larger communities with better content and engagement will naturally consolidate into the more ‘dominant’ ones.
Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the Fediverse in the first place, though? Consolidation of users/power? If we’re going to use a single instance for every topic, then why not just stick with Reddit?
Because there’s multiple instances, and new ones can be spun up if the existing ones “go bad.” It’s completely different from Reddit, I don’t see how you’re considering them the same.
I can make a new website with a forum if Reddit goes “bad,” too, but that doesn’t change anything. All of the content and the users would be on that one specific instance. That’s what people care about: content and a critical mass of users. There’s a reason people are still using Reddit, and it’s not because Reddit has wonderful ownership that cares about the users; it’s because that’s where the most people currently are. Migrating people from one site to another isn’t easy, and that would be the exact same situation if a super popular instance were to go “bad,” whether or not it’s part of the Fediverse.
Except on the fediverse all the old content would still be accessible, and your new site would be connected to the existing network.
Most users would just have to sub to a new community, and thats that. Only users on the instance that went down would have to make entirely new accounts.
Wait, how? I thought the content stayed with the old instance?
If people migrate to [email protected], and use it for 10 years, then they go bad, I can start a new instance and pull in all 10 years of content from the other instance?
No. But all the instances on which users were subbed, would retain archival data.
Moving communities between instances may become possible, though.
It doesn’t change anything on Reddit, because Reddit doesn’t federate with anything and nothing can federate with Reddit. People on Reddit would have to create a new account to interact with your forum.
Here on the Threadiverse, if you start a new community on a new instance then the users who were using the community on the old instance can seamlessly move over to start using the new community instead. The content would remain available to both, the users would remain available to both.
On the Fediverse migrating people isn’t necessary, since users on other instances can interact with each other.
This is ultimately the point of Federation. There isn’t a “critical mass” for each instance because they all share the same userbase in aggregate. As soon as a new instance comes online they instantly have as many users that can post there as an instance that’s been around for years.
My problem was that I have to subscribe to an instance in order to see its posts. If I’m subscribed to [email protected], and they decide to shut off access to the Fediverse for whatever reason, all the content would be gone to me here on kbin, right? Also: I would need to subscribe to a new Star Trek community, because I could no longer connect with the old community? What do you mean by, “the content would remain available to both”? If they shut off the Fediverse, or blacklist my instance, wouldn’t that mean I no longer have access to their content, even old content that I posted?
And yeah, when I say, “migrate,” I mean, “getting people to subscribe to a different instance, because the one they were using turned evil/shut down/disconnected from the Fediverse, etc.” Wouldn’t those scenarios still mandate action by the users in order to find a new community, and thus equate to migration? Just because a new instance has the same number of users that can post there, doesn’t mean there will be the same number of users actively posting there. They will still be using the old instance, and it will take work to get them to start posting to the new instance. That’s my point. From my understanding, the Fediverse decentralizes user accounts, but it doesn’t decentralize content, and that’s where I’m running into my expectations/wishlist issues.
No, only new content would be gone. My understanding is that when you subscribe the content starts being mirrored to your instance, so that’s why you don’t see anything from before the first person on your instance subscribed to it. Presumably that means you would continue seeing the old content, just not new stuff.
This would be annoying, yes. But startrek.website would have absolutely no way to prevent everyone from switching over to [email protected], or [email protected], or whatever other one ends up being the next-most-popular. The admins on startrek.website only have control over startrek.website. So it’s not at all like Reddit, where the admins make decisions and everyone just has to take it.
Sure, but that’s no different from switching to a different subreddit, in the current case of Reddit.
The difference is that there are no admins with power over the fediverse as a whole.
Not really. No more work than posting on a different community on the same instance. Subscribing to communities on other instances from your “home” instance is pretty seamless (aside from the occasional bugs and rough patches, which are simply a result of the current newness of this stuff rather than inherent in the design).
Which doesn’t really happen. The mods of r/news are idiots, but only a tiny number of users actually care about that. Most people either just stop using r/news, or deal with it. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of how things should be. Hell, the only time I’ve seen people switch subreddits is when everyone went from r/antiwork to r/workreform after that disaster of a TV interview; even then, the former currently has 2.6 million subscribers, the latter has 700k, so it appears even that migration was a failure. I can’t imagine this is seen as a good solution.
People don’t want to post in two communities that cover the same topic. Duplicating work like that leads people to seek out a single solution, even if it’s the worse solution. Reddit is so popular because it has a giant number of people posting content to subreddits all the time, meaning even niche topics have a healthy amount of fresh content. If you fragment users into multiple instances (even if they don’t have to worry about creating new user accounts for each one), then it just leads to problems. Eventually they will move towards a single mega-instance, but then you run into the problems above: people won’t leave that instance for a new one until they absolutely cannot stand to be there anymore, and some people are going to have lower tolerances for bullshit than others, which means most people are still going to be using the old instance for a very very long time, splitting content between multiple instances. In other words: why go to [email protected] when there’s so many more users, and so much more fresh content on https://reddit.com/r/worldnews?
There are plenty of news subreddits. I greatly preferred /r/anime_titties, for example.
On Reddit, since there’s only one “instance” and can never be any others, there can only be a single community named “news.” If the name is really so important then the ability to “reuse” the name on other instances gives an advantage to the Fediverse.
Then don’t. I really don’t understand what you think is going on here. If there’s one community you prefer, stick with that.
They are not fragmented. In what way are they fragmented? Everyone can participate in communities on every instance, no matter where they are.
People don’t need to leave that instance.
Because Reddit’s admins suck? Why else are you here?
It’s because nothing’s gonna centralize into one instance. There’s gonna be communities that thrive on one instance, and communities that thrive on others. So, if one instance goes to shit, it doesn’t bring down ALL of the Fediverse; just those communities.
It’s almost like diversifying you investments.
But if all instances connected to a distributed set of content, then an individual instance can go to shit but people will still have the content and users, instead of having to start over with a new community entirely, hoping that everyone jumps to the same instance you jumped to, or else you would have no content to view/interact with.