this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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It's not going to be a problem to find the communities. Since people on arandominstance.com won't be posting on arandominstance.com/c/interestingtopic
They will know if they did, no one would every see it, except for the dozen other people on arandominstance.com
Instead, they'll Google for the biggest /c/interestingtopic , find on what instance it is and go post there
We don't get to the part of having difficulty finding them because they don't get created in the first place
Speaking for myself, my home instance of slrpnk.net is still quite small with only around 600-ish members, but seems active enough to be engaging and certainly worth posting and commenting in. It's not terribly different from posting in a small niche sub on reddit.
If there really was only a dozen members in an instance, I could see where there likely wouldn't be much activity unless it was a group of friends, but I don't see how it wouldn't still function as an effective portal to the other bigger servers, if account creation is ever closed on those.
Are you sure these growing pains will never be addressed? I don't really see why the Lemmy devs would be inclined to not eventually fix these issues. Do you feel the kbin devs would be more receptive to these ideas?
I mean, 600 users that's a lot and yet you look at
https://slrpnk.net/c/knitting
And there isn't one post.
This is what I mean. Your knitting users have to go off instance to https://lemmy.world/c/knitting
In a working system based on federation, it wouldn't matter in what instance you make a /c/knitting post, it would be seen on all instance's /c/knitting
There is no indication this big will every get fixed, and many inducations this is against Lemmy developpement philosophy. I have seen no indication of kbin doing differently either.
Either you post on the big /c/knitting , or nobody (less than 1% of 1% of all Lemmy users) will see your post before it goes stale (72 hrs)
I mean I wouldn't mind a multi-reddit sorta feature like you describe, but I actually like that there are silo'd instances, I don't always want to see EVERY post about a subject on the fediverse if my own community has higher quality content of that subject. Also, not every instance needs to be a generalized place with every topic, I like that many of them cater to certain themes.
I would like the option to see everything of a certain subject at once, don't get me wrong, but I see the small silo'd instances as a feature, not necessarily a bug.
The problem is that it's easy to filter only local content. But the current system is biased for local content first. So paradoxically this means local content will wither and die because no one will see it.
Content should be global first and local second. That way, you can post wherever you like and it will get global exposure.
This way users will not be incentivized to only post in the biggest community on the biggest instance, while leaving everywhere else a desert.
The current way it's built will recreate a centralized Reddit like with few fragmented communities
The problem with multireddit, why they were not able to fulfill to promise of bringing multiple communities together was that only a minuscule subset of users used them.
I guess as I've been using Lemmy more, I see that this is actually a fairly large issue. When I post to, say, a Videos community, I crosspost the link to every other Videos community I can find on the lemmyverse. But that's clunky, and if anyone is subscribed to all of those communities for redundancy, it shows up in their feed multiple times, which is likely a little annoying.
It does seem like the community recognizes this is a problem, and there are open issues for it on the github page. I have to assume that at some point the devs will address this issue, it seems odd that they would purposefully choose to ignore it.