Title is a bit of a loaded question but I tried to fit it into one sentence.
Do you think Lemmy’s search and use functions are hurt by all the communities that were made and abandoned during the 2023 Redditfugee influx? As in, do you think that Lemmy would be better off if some of these communities were consolidated into larger general pages until it gets a big enough user base to warrant individual communities for specific TV shows, for example.
Not any more than reddit is hurt by dead subreddits. I don’t see it as a big problem. But I think discovery is a bigger issue - finding new communities.
Reddit doesn’t have dead clones. Lemmy is full of them.
Clones or subreddits? There are dead subreddits.
We’re talking about dead clones here, which pollute Lemmy.
Yeah I’m pretty tired of manually blocking all the fucking furry porn
This now the third time I’m seeing someone complain about furry porn on Lemmy and I’m just wondering… Where!?
All I ever see is politics politics politics politics tech billionaire farted politics politics politics Elon Musk politics politics.
You forgot memes and shitposting.
You forgot about sport
i love it tho 😩 the new generation of linux users is sooooooo suk
how many subs are showing up in your feed lmao
Some from my blocked list:
Female Yiff
The yiff community of smeargle fans
gay furry porn
furry femboys
yiff_irl
trans yiff
Enjoy!
They pop up in the /all equivalent if you don’t have NSFW communities turned off in your settings. I can only find the proper setting on desktop version tho, not mobile. So if you’ve never checked your account settings on desktop, you’re actually seeing a shitton of furry and anime porn.
Source: I found the setting and turned it off on my PC wondering what I was not seeing. Couldn’t fix it on my phone no matter what I tried. Went back to PC and switched it back and all the porn vanished again. Uncensored Lemmy is thirsty af
ah. i turned on the nsfw content when i made an account because im horny on main and like having that in my feed.
I think being able to start your own community so easily is a great feature of Lemmy, and I also think that abandoned communities regardless of when they were started up should be culled or mothballed after a certain duration of inactivity.
But I thought I read a post where this was actually happening anyway, I think it’s down to the instance’s moderation how strictly policed communities are
Yes, I think so but only indirectly. Distinguishing between the “same” community on different instances or rather identifying the more active one is already pretty hard, the only thing one can really go by is the number of users who have joined. The large number of abandoned copycat communities on 3+ servers doesn’t make this easier since a lot of these have a bunch of users but are dead.
A technical solution could be some kind of “hotness” score for instances to identify the interesting/active ones.
Kind of. The squatters with no activity in the communities are annoying. The small niche ones that are just slow seem normal, not everything needs to be popular and busy.
I think there’s a problem it introduces for users, particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
The first problem is discovery. Discovery isn’t something that can be solved server side afaik without adding a unifying layer to act as an indexer, which is kind of feasible but not really in the federated spirit and would need client integration in any case. Discovery could be made better on the client side, but every client I’ve tried so far has no idea how to do results ranking. I’ll search for “politics” and the top result will be from a topic on an instance with zero posts and two subscribers. Some allow users to specify a sort order but miss results present on other clients, and the sort orders are pretty primitive and only allow you to choose one. I’m also honestly unsure how mainstream search engine indexing is supposed to work (eg “Toyota repair reddit”).
The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances. This problem is exacerbated by the lower content rate, which leaves people browsing /all in case someone posted something interesting somewhere. Again, maybe this is something you could do client side with some off the shelf recommendation engine, and I think a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed, and even posts (on identical articles, for example) into a single displayed post, such that the conversation could cross multiple instances transparently.
particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
I feel like this isn’t discussed in enough of these meta discussions.
I want, for instance, for a video game discussion to have some input from the dude who has just buys Madden and Call of Duty every year.
Absolutely. I think the entire community benefits when we have 60 year old ladies with gardening tips, foodies discussing fine dining and recipes, pet owners with advice driven by twenty years of owning chihuahuas, and sports people talking about sports (okay, that one’s not so much in my ballpark, as it were, but it’s all part of having communities).
If it’s a community for Linux users, or ML folks (machine learning, not politics), or the otherwise terminally online and tech obsessed, I’m fine with the bar for participation being high. At that point we have a filter rather than a net. But if we want to displace (or at least be a serious alternative) to services like Reddit, we need to make the on-ramp and UX easy for people whose interests are interesting but don’t necessarily include technology beyond knowing how to click on the blue words. If someone can tell me that putting an aspirin in my rhododendron will make it spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus, I don’t care if they know the fediverse from a hole in the ground.
Also, I made that tip up. Don’t do it, or if you do let me know if it actually works.
One can request abandoned communities at [email protected]. The mods can either transfer ownership to someone else directly (which keeps all the content intact) or nuke the community so the interested user can start from scratch.
Not many people seem to be aware about this tho, or maybe don’t want to ask openly, or feel bad taking over what someone else had started.
So, as for your actual question, I think culling completely inactive, empty communities after a while would be the best option, so the names are freed up again for people who are actually interested in moderating. If the community already has content but no (active) mods, then “adopting” it is the better option, but there should be an additional way to communicate all of that clearer to the userbase. Maybe something like the current “community spotlight” but advertising abandoned communities that are up for adoption …?
I wasn’t aware, thanks!
yea, for c/tf2 the original mod for it was completely inactive, so I posted in the lemmy wirld support and they added a new mod who then made a post looking for new mods, all worked out in the end :)
Pretty much all the copycat communities suck ass. They don’t have any of the charm of the originals and are all just poorly-moderated, homogenous crap
Copycats of Reddit communities or copies of other Lemmy communities on different instances?
Communities that took the names of subreddits while only loosely staying on theme
We could use some consolidation - if anything, it’s not general enough in some areas, and others are so tightly defined it’s a circle-jerk.
Edit: had a rethink - I mean it’s all very flat. I wouldn’t mind a small hierarchy to find the topic, and more granularity in subgroups.
Doom scrolling on lemmy is better than reddit
I don’t think it causes any problems
The biggest problem with Lemmy Community is “Linux is not for newbies and it does not work as smithy as windows” Sentence will give you negative Karma in hundreds. The community is smug about using Linux Anywhere on Lemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t have Karma, it’s not visible on the webUI currently and will be completely removed in the next version.
idk this sounds more like a personal issue
As a windows main:
Linux absolutely has distro that will work just fine for most basic computer users right out of the box. Mint passed the wife test AND the Mom test (and my mother is in her late 50s and doesn’t use computers normally).
So you’re likely getting downvoted because you’re just wrong.
A better point might be “most people just don’t care enough to learn the different workflow”, which is also why people tend not to swap between phone OS either
I have no problem changing be it windows or Linux, but things don’t work in Linux, I will give you example, when closing the lid don’t suspend the power is easy to find and setup in windows. They to do that in one of the friendliest Linux i.e. ZORIN OS and tell me your mother can do it.
Or try to play and video saved from iphone with live images ,(hevc format i think )and see what error Linux throws and see if you can at least know what is needed , which windows tell you in face.
To put it another way the community isn’t very diverse. For example it’s got way more Linux enthusiasts than the general population.
