this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?
This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.
There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.
You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.
I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.
Again: so what? It's reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.
You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn't bother me, and I truly don't understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.
Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls "Thinking in Words". If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it's easy to coordinate a move away.
In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.
It's not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven't seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.
Cool. It doesn't bother you. Then just keep doing what you're doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won't care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don't care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?
This isn't about maximizing reach of our posts. It's about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.
Great, so let's talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.
But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.
Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.
It's a huge problem with the platform which you choose to ignore by saying "so what". It's impossible to refute someone who digs in their heels and says "so what" to everything and not seeing the problem.
There is a difference between "not seeing the problem" and "asking yourself what are the implications of it". I'm running 15+ instances and I'm running a website that is devoted to help people find the "canonical" community in the fediverse. I can point to dozens of other issues that are a lot more "painful" to me as an user and an instance admin, none of them are related with the "pain of having to choose which community to join or focus".
I'm again going to ask: is there any actual, practical example of this being such a "huge issue"?
And yet people want a better solution and are asking for it. And the only response you, an owned of 15+ instances, and an admin of a website that helps people find instances, can make is "deal with it it's meant to be hard". It's a huge usability problem, it's funny that you don't see it. Consider this my last reply to you.
It's the Linux mindset, the pain is the point.