Didn’t think about it before, but saw this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/26747873

Lemmy tends to have duplicate communities between different instances for many subjects, and this can make it hard to find information here. For instance, if i want to know if anyone has made a constructed language for birds, i have to go to the communities list and search for “conlang” and “constructed language”, open every relevant community i find, and search each of those.

The Lemmy search feature quite good, but having all the knowledge about one topic on one community makes it even better

There is a GitHub issue, but no planned deadline: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

  • FrostyTrichs@crazypeople.online
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    23 hours ago

    There’s also the argument that people should get used to the idea of not being force fed from one source/community/etc. Redundancy also has its perks.

    Lemmy’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness imo. The decentralized nature makes it much less intuitive to navigate and use when you’re new because it just works differently to what people are used to and commonly expect.

    Having multiple communities isn’t a problem if they aren’t dead imo. The problem is a user base that doesn’t have a native way to easily access everything on the fediverse (or even Lemmy) from whatever instance they register on. That leaves us with users who simply don’t know any better when they look for communities with a local search and can’t find them.

    I think we need to work on retraining people to search using tools like lemmyverse, or find a way to build its functionality into the default Lemmy search. Consolidated communities only help if people are able to find them reliably and many of the users are brand new and struggle with the transition.

    • fuzzzerd@programming.dev
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      18 hours ago

      While I mostly agree, the duplication of shared links is definitely a problem that is frustrating once you have a setup you like and follow a few similar communities.

      • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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        17 hours ago

        Yes, having a dead community isn’t that big of an issue per se. The worse case is probably when there are two similar communities with the same links posted on both sides.

      • FrostyTrichs@crazypeople.online
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        21 hours ago

        Posts like that are a great resource. Thanks for all the time and energy you put into promoting this place. It’s certainly appreciated.

        Part of the problem is we’re fighting an uphill battle. After decades of preaching to people on the internet to use the search we’ve given them one that often can’t actually find things for them without some fiddling. New and smaller instances are particularly prone to this. If the goal is being interconnected as a feature we need better ways to make that connection user friendly and automatic.

          • FrostyTrichs@crazypeople.online
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            21 hours ago

            In a perfect world where traffic and hosting costs didn’t matter it would be handy to integrate the lemmyverse results into lemmy instances when a local user searches for something. With an option to toggle it on/off from the admin panel you’d be able to cover federated and private instances that wanted local only search. I’m sure someone more technical than me could figure it out pretty easily, but that’s a lot of traffic to absorb for lemmyverse.net.

      • .Donuts@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Don’t ask me, I’m not in charge.

        It seems a bit disingenuous that that decided to omit that comment in your write-up though.

        • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          22 hours ago

          No worries, I just wanted to check if I was missing something.

          Not sure if it’s disingenuous to omit a comment saying it will be fixed “some day” while people are experiencing those issues now. I still added this at the end for complete context.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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    23 hours ago

    Where consolidation makes sense it’s always good. But part of what makes Lemmy special is that there’s multiple communities about different subjects. For example Technology. I don’t fuck with the LW community at all, but I’m a regular poster in the BH community and regularly post in the more technical PD community. If all were consolidated it would alienate me as I don’t actually wanna deal with a bunch of people that post in the biggest communities. It’s also why I subscribe to communities and avoid the ALL feed.

    I feel you’re making a dangerous assumption where you feel everyone should want to be part of a centralised community and that’s not what Lemmy is about. Sometimes smaller communities just wanna be that.

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      23 hours ago

      Oh, I definitely agree!

      Technology is a very widely discussed topic on Lemmy, so having different communities makes sense.

      I was more thinking about the case above. I don’t think conlangs have enough of a user base to split across different communities, with adding hurdles to search for content about that topic on top.