this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
25 points (87.9% liked)
Fediverse
34695 readers
59 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We don't need to beat reddit. We don't need to beat anyone. There are no investors or shareholders. There are no stock listings. There are no ads or addictive algos. We are fine as we are now. There is no need for exponential growth. Lemmy should simply be.
We do need to continue growing at a natural but sustained rate. 50-60k is not a healthy place to stop and there's still a lot of low hanging fruit development-wise.
Its not clear to me that the issues I'm identifying can be resolved with a new release. Id love to have the discussion, but it goes deeper than just discovery.
I think the best example of how to 'lemmy' properly, or in a way that doesn't create 'wasted votes' (in the gerrymandering sense) of content, is the startrek lemmy. The focus on a niche topic and own it entirely. Theres no point in having lemmy subcommunities based on startrek because the startrek lemmy is so great and makes such great content.
Contrast this with lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, most of the other big instances. Mostly redundant sublemmys. Because of this, the quantity of content is very thin, and because of this, good content is less likely to gather momentum. A way to group sublemmys across instances could work, almost like a kind of sub-federation (like, on lemmy.world, maybe lemmy.ml/c/memes is federated into lemmy.world/c/memes. any content posted to one is 'considered' posted to the other). It seems relatively straightforward (not a trivial lift, but reasonably possible) to merge the two RSS feeds.
The same issue exists with discovery. Things are too diffuse in lemmys current network structure.
I've gone through some graduate level coursework on network mathematics, and I work with networks in a very different context, but I don't exactly have the math skill to write out a proof on this. This paper outlines the basic concept, but to extend it to social media, we basically get much much better content in the form of submissions, comments and discussions, with super-connectivity. Its kind of fundamental to social media graphs and there are some clear barriers in lemmys design that prevent it.
These things absolutely can be fixed in an update but I think we both know the devs have no intention of going in that direction.
Its not clear to me that they can. Some of these problems relate back to activity hub.
And I just want to be clear, I think what we have currently based on activity hub are a great, proof of concept 1.0 (mastadon, lemmy, so many of the others), and that these lessons learned will feed back into activity hub 2.0, at which point there can be a material 'taking back' of the internet from corporate interests.
But right now, its not clear to me the current protocols or systems are where they need to be.