Should we decide to have a main fediverse community or should we keep posting everything twice? - eviltoast

Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

  • people having to subscribe to both to see the content
  • posters having to crosspost to both
  • comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that’s pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it’s either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

    • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      81·
      1 year ago

      It’s interesting, because it can be compared to real politics where you have nations that are neutral and can serve as hosts for events where countries with completely different views and sometimes even high tensions can meet.

      The League of Nations (that preceded the United Nations) used to be hosted in Switzerland, which is usually seen as a neutral ground.

      Maybe we could try to have something similar? Or we can even imagine a large list of admins, all from different instances, so that everyone watches what is happening with the instance, so that no one could hijack it?

      • Chariotwheel@kbin.social
        5·
        1 year ago

        In the end, it would still be on someone’s server. And people would need to trust the owner of that server to pay, maintain and not interfere unnecessarily.

          • Chariotwheel@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yes, but you wanted a neutral ground, and my point was that it’s hard to have something like, because in the end it would just be another server. I am not saying we don’t need a solution, I just pointing out a flaw in your proposed solution.

            • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deOP
              21·
              1 year ago

              That’s fair, and this is why I said having an admin team composed of people from different instances would be a way to mitigate that.

              Regarding costs, as it would be a content instance with only a few communities (you want everyone to be able to access the communities on that server, but without any users, this server would not have to replicate any of the other communities) the cost should be kept quite low.

              Donations could come from other instances as a way to show their good faith about an open fediverse space.

              I’m questioning now how the United Nations is funded, but it’s probably based on member countries donations.

        • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deOP
          21·
          1 year ago

          The instance would only hosts a few communities (!fediverse, and maybe a few others).

          Users would not be allowed to register there. Moderation would indeed need to be heavy, you can imagine only moderators being able to create posts, while users would be allowed to comment (you would have to ask a moderator to open a topic. Cumbersome, but at least you prevent topic spamming).