Like, what makes sense to me would be a way to 'sub-federate' two or more RSS feeds into one. IE, if lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are federated, lemmy.world has the option to 'sub-federate' c/memes from .ml with c/memes from .world, or at least the moderators would have that option. You may only want there to be a 1:1 with sub-federation (IE, you don't want many .world /c's subfederated with one .ml /c or you would get a (possibly extreme) duplication of content. But this could be option and up the the lemmy instance to decide how to configure.

Regardless, the 'wideness' of the way the network is set up with many nodes and relatively few edges is the primary issue. It can't be resolved with just 'more engagement'. Reddit doesn't suffer from this issue as much because there its only one order of dilution (one reddit, many subreddits). Lemmy suffers more because there are two orders of dilution (many lemmy, many sublemmys). Its also important to note here that Reddit did not have subreddits to begin with. They came later, which helped them build the critical mass to overcome the diffusion problem.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not sure its in the works

Possibly ... but it's been spoken about by the devs before, so it's on their radar at least. It may have even come up in their AMA? I know a way of sorting that surfaces smaller communities definitely did come up and is definitely in the works.

Otherwise, I'm not sure you're convincing me.

It seems to me that you have to start by establishing that "parallel" communities (ie different communities with similar or identical focus) here are worse than on reddit. Unless there's a large amount of complex defederation going on, I don't see how the decentralisation substantially worsens the effect the existence of parallel communities has on "engagement" compared to the situation over on Reddit. And, as far as I understand, such a large and complex defederation/federation network has not happened. The most significant example of defederation is probably the beehaw-lemmy.world defederation, where beehaw only has about 3% of lemmy's active users.

So I'm not sure your two orders of dilution (many lemmy, many sublemmys) argument follows. THe 196 community over on blahaj seems like a good example, where it has 5 times as many active users as there local to the whole blahaj instance. the startrek.website is in a similar boat. Federation seems to be working fine. And while there are duplicate communities lying around, I don't think that means that people aren't naturally flocking to where they feel is the best place to be for things while allowing diversity to exist.

So, if parallel communities are fine, or even good (which is my take, at least to an extent), I'm not sure there's a sufficient argument for the need to implement sub-federation on the backend. I'd bet it would be tricky and add a whole new kind of entity to sort out.

Comparatively, the multi-communities idea, I'd guess, is a much more natural extension as it's really just allowing a user to have multiple sets of subscriptions, which is an already established process/feature.

Also, I'd wager that putting flexibility in the hands of users rather than community moderators is probably a better way to go.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Comparatively, the multi-communities idea, I’d guess, is a much more natural extension as it’s really just allowing a user to have multiple sets of subscriptions, which is an already established process/feature.

I guess that's where I see the issue and maybe were talking past each other a bit. I think if its community moderators that 'subscribe' their sublemmys to multi-communities, that could work. But if its on individual users, its not going to solve the fundamental underlying issue of discovery.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hear you. I appreciate you breaking down the conversation too!!

I guess I’d hope discovery could occur through wide spread multi-community suggestions, ideally posted in community sidebars too ( though that’s probably unlikely). I’d also hope the cross post interface gets better, with all cross posts listed (not just those that share a URL), and the ability to view all comments from all cross posts together (maybe with some options around whether you subscribe to them or not).

Beyond that, I’m still not sure we’re in a worse position than Reddit was, apart from currently having a small size?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Oh, overall I think lemmy is way better than reddit, even now. But the bigger the fediverse gets the more consequences come from drastic changes. Good to have these discussions now going through the growing pains under a relatively small user base.