I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.

I think it’s a little like the competing Lemmy android/iOS apps. It’s totally fine for there to be multiple ways to do it, and some people can adopt multiple types, or just one, or none.

If you think organizing in groups at all is authoritarian, that’s on you dude. Take your pedantry to someone who cares.

The moderators on communities that have decided to approach this in this way will discuss it amongst themselves and begin a thread requesting a new feature on the github. In the meantime, the moderators can work together to sketch out a plan of how to connect their communities in a loosely organized manner, where each community links to one another, and cross-posts will be recognized, while not explicitly favoring one community over another. Basically, just moderators working with other moderators and communicating and making a plan that works for those communities, and will likely be different for each set of communities.

If the feature fails to gain traction because there aren’t enough interested parties, then oh well. Maybe one of the interested parties knows a little Rust and will write in the feature themselves and ask for their work to be added to the mainline project. Anyway, these things take time, and running around howling about how it won’t work before people have even really had formative discussions about it isn’t helpful. Yeah, it’s decentralized, which means some people will take longer to find out that the option exists, because they’re on a site that isn’t federated with somesuch other site, and the meandering path of news of “tools to organize multiple communities as a larger whole,” might take longer to get to them. That’s… not the end of the world, you know? That’s the nature of decentralization, initially, the conversation won’t involve everybody. Over time, maybe it will, but likely some areas of the fediverse will wall themselves off and not be interested in connecting their communities to others and that’s fine. That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions on how to interact, everything from not interacting at all, up to and including making “webrings” of related Lemmy communities. I’m not sure why you need a whole gameplan laid out for you, but it feels like maybe you haven’t been part of a lot of self-organizing communities in your life. These things grow organically. Yes, that includes competing standards growing at the same time, much like there being a bunch of different Lemmy apps existing at the same time.

but that the power to decide what “we” should do does not and can not exist at all.

Man, wait until world governments find out! They’ll be so happy that don’t have to interface with other countries for anything or care what their citizens think. Because apparently the ability to organize does not and can not exist at all! Geographical separation!

The fuck are you on about, mate? Humans organizing in different formats is basically all we do. This is also literally about how you go about doing that. Is your problem that some people get to say “No, I don’t want to be part of that” because if you don’t like it, then don’t use it, and don’t communicate with others to try to create loosely interconnected communities. Just sit by yourself on your own instance and play by your own rules. Literally no one is saying you can’t.

I don’t know, OP sounds like they understand it pretty well with well-considered suggestions that take decentralized federation into account. Sorry you don’t like them.

These are excellent suggestions, and I agree wholeheartedly. I think the main difficulty is in labeling “sibling communities” as such, because when you create a community, it’s not like you magically know which ones are supposed to be siblings to you.

What happens when you have two sibling communities that seem like they’re the same based on name and topic, but when it comes to moderation, they’re so different, you couldn’t really call them “siblings,” up to an including the mods from one not wanting to be associated with the other sibling community. Would there be an option to sever that relationship?

That’s funny, I thought it was redditor-level entitlement that showed up.

Sorry, I just think it’s a dumb, entitled complaint. I’m not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.

Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It’s actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).

I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore

No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

That’s a much more… coherent explanation than your original one, friend. I wouldn’t have argued this point if you had started here.

So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.

Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.

It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.

They are perfectly normal. Unlike giant corporations, the people who run Lemmy don’t have the money to support a fleet of failover servers that take over when the main server goes offline. That’s basically the only reason you don’t see lots of downtime from major corporations: investment in redundancy, so when something breaks, a perfect copy takes over. Server crashes happen all the time for major corporations, you just never see them due to investment in redundancy.

That’s the difference between a community and a company. One takes actual investment from the community as a whole, and the other ruthlessly exploits for profit.

Just gotta follow The Rule

I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)

I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.

You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.

I personally don’t mind having multiple communities on different servers because some of these servers go down… a lot.

Makes sense to have “backups” sort of littered throughout the Fediverse, imho. I like seeing what different groups have to say about the subjects, too. Like, a thread will be wildly different on lemmy.world and beehaw.org, because I’m fairly sure beehaw is still defederated with lemmy.world, meaning I’ll see very different groups of people on each instance’s community.

I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.

That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.

In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.

I mean, I keep coming back to that being the entire point of the Fediverse.

Sure, it means in some ways discussion can be different on different servers, but isn’t that the entire point? To not have a single point of failure? If one instance puts down draconian rules that makes a certain community unwelcome, then why not move to an instance that you feel is welcoming?

In other words, post where you feel like, and/or where the people are. I really don’t have an issue with cross-posting to other instances or having different discussions about the same subject.

Some instances have defederated with others, so another aspect of this is having multiple communities means people who have been defederated can still take part in the same community on a still federated instance.

I think this cements worries that some people who are trying to run these servers don’t actually understand the severity of the bot-problem online and aren’t doing enough to protect themselves, not even the basics. It makes you wonder what kind of other basic cybersecurity protections they haven’t set up on their servers, or if their servers are even hardened at all.

I wonder how much (if any) of this is driven by reddit to create more ambiguity to people’s feelings about the fediverse? It’s totally possible it’s all “organic” bot growth, but if they’re willing to go to the lengths they have against their own users, I also wouldn’t put it past them to be trying to destroy the credibility of any “competitors” in the space.

It seems like it can take several minutes or more for the search to find the federated instance and start populating search results.

Similarly, I wish Matrix/Element would grow in popularity to compete with Discord, who will also eventually be pursuing and IPO and will allow enshittification to swallow them whole.