Lemmy.World Announcements

29048 readers

4 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages 🔥

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)

Donations 💗

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Join the team

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

443

Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

186 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the past few days, I've witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (24 children)

The underlying problem here is the lemmy community being spread out across many instances, and this solution doesn't really fix the underlying problem.

This is just speculation, but I think eventually 1-4 instances will grow much bigger than the rest. I think when this happens, communities will become much less fragmented and the problem will solve itself.

tl;dr while this is a good idea, I think if we just leave everything the way it is the problem will solve itself.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The goal of implementing this feature is to leverage the benefits of federation. If we wait until there is only a few big communities, the purpose of having federation becomes irrelevant. When an instance hosting one of those large communities shuts down, the community would have to migrate to the next major community.

By proactively implementing this feature, Lemmy can harness the advantages of federation while actively mitigating the challenges posed by community fragmentation and echo chambers. It provides a centralized hub that encourages cross-pollination of ideas, fosters community engagement, and ensures that valuable content is accessible to all users, regardless of the size or popularity of individual communities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I disagree on two points:

Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Echo chambers will always exist, but fragmentation is what keeps them contained to small pockets.
A centralized hub would not necessarily foster community engagement. Seeing hundreds of comments on a post is often enough of a barrier.

load more comments (22 replies)