This is exactly the thought process I went through while reading the post. Doing it preemptively can make it come across like you’re severing the connection due to opinions rather than rule breaking.
But still, THANK YOU to the admins, in general. I am not accusing you of anything negative like that. I trust that you thought it through way more than I did. Thanks for keeping this big general insurance of ours awesome.
We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.
And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.
There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.
But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.
It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.
A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.
I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.
That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the “merge” functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.
But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. There’s strength in diversity too.
I thought the same thing when some (talented and well meaning) individuals recently put out tools/procedures to access Reddit in a more clean way.
Nah. I don’t need to be an absolutist — I’ll load up a page if some search shows me that’s the only place to get what I’m looking for — but spending time to make undesirable websites more accessible for myself isn’t something I plan to do.
I guess I am at a point where I can find enough interesting stuff that I can accept “If you build it, they will come” for now.
Basically, I’m not expecting the finished product yet, but things look promising. Hopefully the necessary momentum is there.
I’m not into Lemmy because it’s got all the niche communities I need in my life. I’m into it because the fediverse in general is a FOSS, decentralized, “by the people for the people” alternative to enshittified ads&engagement social media.
We’re in the early stages of this thing. We’re all still playing with the building blocks of what this will hopefully become one day.
I’m reading through the comments and every reply of yours is like another stroke of the paint brush. I will watch your dark art from afar.
I love this so much. Much like a child’s drawing or even Lemmy itself, it might look rough but at the same time it’s exactly what I want to see.
You aren’t kidding. I got four tiny spearmint plants this spring. They are growing kind of hydroponically because I have a pond.
In less than three months, those plants have exploded into huge nice-smelling bushes that are more than two feet in each dimension. They are planted in a line so there’s this walk of mint that’s almost 12 feet long.
But that’s not enough. The plants send out branches along the ground like freaking tentacles. They will spill out of a planter box, for instance.
The fast growth is why I chose this plant, but damn!
That sounds great! I will be following the app’s progress for sure.
By the way, the other thing that stood out was not being able to tap on an image and view just that image full screen. Being able to do that leads to things like zooming in on the image, or long pressing to copy/share it.
You also included features I didn’t even know I wanted, like the privacy option to hide your username. You’re doing good work, my friend. o7
Trying Mlem for the first time, the only thing that bothers me is that it shows total post scores and not individual numbers for up/down votes. I like seeing when something is controversial vs ignored.
Once I tried Memmy, I stopped paying attention to new apps.
I might have to try one or two mentioned here, though.
We are using the better version right now to discuss ways to [not] shoehorn the worse version back into our lives, lol.
I respect the project a great deal, but I just don’t see myself putting any effort into making Reddit accessible for myself.
Even if there were zero reasons to avoid Reddit on principle, Lemmy is just a better “product” for what I want out of it.
If I’m googling something at work and need to view a page there, fine. I’ll just use a cached page or visit directly with ad blocking as if it were any other webpage. That might benefit the company in some small way, but that doesn’t make it worth prepping my devices to better make use of Reddit.
This place is at a magical point in its growth where it has enough people to fully replace that other site for me (but higher quality), but it’s also still new and exciting and worth contributing to help it succeed.
I think I have like 5 Lemmy apps installed, including the voyager web app, but I keep coming back to Memmy.