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.

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I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes. It feels like a reddit clone that has the exact same mindset as reddit. I get annoyed when I see people being moderated for having an opinion that is not popular.

I saw a post being locked yesterday for asking about moderation. Doesn’t anyone else see the problem with that? Your channels rules are not more important than making people feel they can talk and express what’s on their mind.

I hate that so much. Stop treating people like they are just resources to moderate.

I don’t see much discussions. But I’m sure there is a few here and there.

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Yeah because first of all, content had to be spread out across 562826 different communities for no reason other than that reddit had lots of communities, after growing for many many years. It started with just a few.

Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world, and every new user was directed to sign up at Lemmy.world.

I guess a lot of people here are younger than me and didn’t experience forums, but we had like 30 forum channels. That was enough to talk about anything at all. And I believe it’s the same here, it would have been enough. And then all channels would have easy to find content.

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It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.

There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.

I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.

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Visibility-Based Ranking: Factor in how often a post is shown to users by tracking the number of times a post appears in users’ feeds and calculating an “engagement rate” by dividing votes by views. Rank “Top of All Time” posts using this engagement rate. This option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of post views or the number of times a post appears in users’ feeds.

Community-Specific Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on each community’s monthly active user count at the time of posting. Unfortunately, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count for each community over time.

Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on the instance’s monthly active user count at the time of posting. However, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count over time.

The “Top of All Time” lists on Lemmy are currently dominated by posts from the exodus period, potentially overshadowing excellent content from both before and after this event.

Unfortunately, none of the suggested solutions can be implemented as the required data hasn’t been tracked over time by the software.

Makes me wonder how much time people will waste debating with AIs in the internet in the future.

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This is golden.

Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM

I remember there was a lot of drama around this, I can’t believe it’s still an issue.

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Comprehensive Tagging System

I once read that there are some states in the U.S. where firefighters don’t put out fires in houses that don’t pay a monthly subscription.

I’m particularly concerned about the potential for automods to become a problem on Lemmy, especially if it gains popularity like Reddit. I believe a Discourse-style trust level system could be a better approach for Lemmy’s moderation, but instead of rewarding “positive contributions,” which often leads to karma farming, the system should primarily recognize user engagement based on time spent on the platform and reading content. Users would gradually earn privileges based on their consistent presence and understanding of the community’s culture, rather than their ability to game the system or create popular content. This approach would naturally distribute moderation responsibilities among seasoned users who are genuinely invested in the community, helping to maintain a healthier balance between user freedom and community standards, and reducing the reliance on bot-driven moderation and arbitrary rule enforcement that often plagues many Reddit communities.

Grant users privileges based on activity level

A more robust approach could involve combining multiple user engagement metrics like votes, reading time and number of comments, along with a system that sorts posts depending on how they compare to their community averages. This system would be less susceptible to manipulation by new accounts or brigading, as it would require genuine engagement across multiple factors to influence a post’s ranking.

Incorporating User Engagement Metrics in Lemmy’s Sorting Algorithms

Reminds me of Custom Feeds

• Inspired by Firefish’s Antennas feature
• Similar to Reddit’s multireddit functionality
• Follow specific users, communities, and instances
• Include/exclude tags or keywords
• Choose post types (posts, comments, or both)
• Set custom feeds as default

The decentralized nature of Lemmy, while appealing in theory, creates significant frustration in practice due to widespread instance blocking. Finding an ideal instance becomes a daunting task, as users must navigate a complex web of inter-instance politics and restrictions. This challenge is further compounded for those who prioritize factors like low latency or specific content policies. Lemmy’s architecture heavily favors instance-level configurations, leaving individual users with limited control over their experience. The only reliable solutions seem to be either hosting a personal instance—a technical hurdle for many—or simply hoping that your chosen instance’s admins align with your preferences and don’t block communities you enjoy. This politicking ultimately undermines the platform’s potential.

There were several issues on GitHub regarding proposals on how to solve the low visibility of small instances. However, after the Scaled Sort was implemented, all those issues were closed, yet the problem persists. I continue to use Reddit the same as before because I primarily used it for niche communities, which are lacking here. The few times I’ve posted to a niche community here, I’ve either received no answers or been subject to drive-by downvotes, likely from users not even subscribed to the community. As a result, I now only post on Lemmy when the post is directed to a large community, and I use Reddit for the rest.