this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Sibling communities: A middle way (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by fresh@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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There's been an ongoing debate about whether communities should combine or stay separate. Both have significant disadvantages and advantages:

Combine:

  • Network effects. Smaller communities become viable if they pool together their userbase. Communities with more people (up to a point!) are generally more useful and fun.
  • Discoverability. Right now, I might stumble on a 50 subscriber community and not realize everyone has abandoned it for the lively 500 subscriber community somewhere else, maybe with a totally different name.

Separate:

  • Redundancy. If a community goes down, or an instance is taken down, people can easily move over.
  • Diffusion of political power. Users can choose a different community or instance if the current one doesn't suit them. Mods are less likely to get drunk on power if they have real competition.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but I just want to show that each side has significant advantages over the other.

Sibling communities:

To have some of the advantages of both approaches, how about we have official "sibling communities"? For example, sign up for fediverse@lemmy.world and, along the top, it lists fediverse@lemmy.ml as a sibling community.

  • When you post, you have an easily accessible option to cross-post automatically to all sibling communities. You can also set it so that only the main post allows comments, to aggregate all comments to just one post, if that's desirable.
  • The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you're subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a "cross-sibling post" designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.
  • Both mod teams must agree to become siblings, so it can't be forced on any community.
  • Mods of either community can also decide to suppress the cross post if they feel it's too spammy or not suitable for cross discussion.
  • This allows you to easily learn about all related communities without abandoning your current one. This increases the network effects without needing to combine or destroy communities.

Of course, this could be more informal with just a norm to sticky a post at the top of every community to link to related communities. At least that way I know of the existence of other communities. I personally prefer the official designation so that various technologies can be implemented in the ways I mentioned.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Redundancy has been so important recently with the DDoS attacks, and even as that subsides it's still definitely an important infrastructural perk that federation offers. It'd be a shame to lose that to centralization.

[–] dbilitated@aussie.zone 12 points 1 year ago

it would be good to have some kind of linking.

my feed is usually ten copies of the same thing posted to similar communities on different servers

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn't address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I do! It's why I thought it was important to highlight - I'm not too concerned about mod tyranny, per se, but I am concerned about servers going down.

[–] Lucia@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 year ago

Since I don't follow that much .world communities, I never really was affected by these attacks, so yeah, I totally agree with you! I hope we'll end up more decentralized at time goes on. It was hard to navigate people during the migration so a lot of them ended up in a huge one.

[–] erlend_sh@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The general idea is good, but I still believe the best solution is the ability for Communities to follow other Communities. That is essentially a fully automated version of this sibling proposal.

This has been explained in great detail by ‘jamon’ here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113#issuecomment-1595273502

This basically lets Communities opt to federate directly with other Communities, abiding by the same network dynamics as the fediverse at large, I.e. cross-network moderation by (de)federation.

Here’s a succinct description of the problem that C-C following solves:

If you are an active user (not moderator) of Lemmy, the requirement for this becomes apparent almost immediately. One of the biggest strengths of these forum are communities-at-scale. Being able to easily post and interact with large groups of people is the benefit to the user that makes Lemmy (and all other social media) appealing.

As a user, I recently wanted to post to AskLemmy. Almost every single instance has thier own separate AskLemmy implementation. Naturally, I'd tend to post to the one with the most users. But inherently, I'm missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to AskLemmy@lemmy.ml (which had 3k users), but by doing that, I'm missing out on the users from lemm.ee, behaw, lemmy.world which in total are far more than 3k.

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is a good idea too, but I do see them as different implementations with different advantages.

  • "Following" is much simpler to implement, because it uses mostly existing systems. That's a big bonus.
  • "Following" is essentially automatic cross-posting, right? Presumably, everything from the followed community is cross-posted to the follower communities. I can't think of when I would ever prefer that over getting selective cross-posts. Sometimes I don't want to blast stuff out to all communities. Sometimes I want to post something in a local community, and other times I want to hear from all related (sibling) communities. Maybe it's just too centralized for me.
  • Siblings are related to each other but retain their unique identity. A followed person doesn't need to know or care about the follower, and doesn't have to allow any input from the follower. "Sibling" relations are bidirectional, while "follower" relations are unidirectional (though both sides can follow each other). I think all this has a big functional difference.

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

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You've just reminded me of something that used to happen around 20 years ago on smaller forums which is "forum affiliates", where two or more forums with overlapping discussion interests would simply agree to link to each other to drive traffic.

I'm not sure how common that ever was or if it just happened with the types of forums I would visit, but it worked and there's nothing really similar in the Fediverse. Normally as a rule I tend towards the "stay separate" camp for communities - but something to boost visibility of related communities might at least help with the perceived drawbacks.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Web rings were definitely a thing.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago

According to my memory web rings were a bit earlier than the time-frame I'm talking about, but similar thing.

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

That's interesting. I think I vaguely remember those too. The term "affiliates" sounds so corporate nowadays, but I think it's a similar idea.

I'm also strongly in the camp of "stay separate". I wouldn't ever want to give that up. But I'm also frequently frustrated by discoverability of related communities and needlessly separated small userbases.

[–] Lazerbeams2@ttrpg.network 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This sounds good to me. I'm subscribed to c/rpgmemes which is run by the the old mod team of r/dndmemes but I'm also subscribed to c/dndmemes which is apparently run by people who wanted something like r/dndmemes. It's a little redundant and confusing but I wouldn't want either mod team to lose what they made

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's a great example, especially because they have slightly different names. If you're not in the know, you might never know.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting idea, thanks for sharing!

You might want to cross-post this to !fediverse@lemmy.world to get that community's feedback as well

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Good idea. Will do.

[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago

I think this has interesting but overall very positive implications for the local feed.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Yep ... agree! And have basically thought similarly on my own too. Thanks for proposing and writing this up!

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] Lucia@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

Users will most probably cross-post from them.

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Good points. I'll be more explicit about the details:

If, at the time of formation, you don't know which communities would be siblings, then it's the same as the current status quo, so I don't see that as a comparative disadvantage. In any case, there's no reason to rush into siblinghood. One hope would be that the existence of the term "sibling community" itself would encourage people to discuss possible connections, even when they're not yet connected. I hope it brings like-minded groups together.

The sibling relation would need the consent of both mod teams, not just one side, so it can be unilaterally severed, but only jointly formed. No one would force lefty news and righty news to become siblings. But there are currently 5+ major "Technology" communities that are almost entirely overlapping. I hope siblings would allow them to overlap where appropriate but maintain their unique identities.

[–] Lucia@eviltoast.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's something similar on Beehaw: on !technology@beehaw.org sidebar they include links to "subcommunities": for c/foss, c/programming and c/os. I would love to see more communities add related c/'s in their description too!

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think multi-communities will solve a lot of this - you can group, for example, all the movie communities together or the meme ones and get a coherent feed, so it wouldn't really matter which you posted to.

The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you’re subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a “cross-sibling post” designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.

Doesn't this already happen? At least within an instance, my experience is that, if you cross-post, the second post doesn't appear in your all feeds.

[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One big issue with the existing cross-posting feature is that it does not work AT ALL with text based posts, just links.

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

I didn't know that. All very odd.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

one thing that's annoying about this is that sometimes new content will be added to an old URL

like Steam Hardware Surveys, there's no way to perma-link to a specific month, their page only shows the most recent results

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

which can cause weird issues with Lemmy thinking it's the same post and only showing 1 of them

I had this issue with one of my own communities, I was posting links to the Github Releases page for every new release (which is usually good because people finding old links on Google should see the latest release and the full list of releases, not the one specific release)

but I realized only 1 post would be visible at a time, and if you did Top All sort then it would be a post about an old release, now I gotta post directly to the specific release

when Lemmy has some form of sibling communities or grouped communities, I think it can be less aggressive in detecting "cross-posts" and only explicit cross-posts would be handled as such

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe it does already happen? Then again, I don’t want it to always happen!

Cross-posting itself can also be a form of commentary. For example, c/London might cross-post something from c/NewYork — “Hey, this would be a cool idea for our city too!” Or “They’re talking about us. Thoughts?” — and the separate set of comments are desirable because they come from a different community. I want these to be two separate posts sometimes.

——

Multi-communities seem similar. Is that a grouping the user makes? If so, I think that’s too much work and will still lead to unnecessary fracturing. What if I follow a few Technology communities and a new one is made since the last time I checked? Do I have to go through and manually check if all my multi-communities are current?

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I want these to be two separate posts sometimes.

They are two separate posts, it's just cross-posting won't flood your instances "all" feed. They would still appear as a post in /c/London and one in /c/NewYork with separate comment threads

Is that a grouping the user makes?

In the Reddit apps that had multi-sub functionality then I believe they were user created but this is a brave new world and we don't have to do it that way. People or instances or communities could create multi-communities and people could subscribe to them so only a central file would be updated. If it stopped being updated or was too broad or too specific, it could be forked. I wonder if that could even be rolled into a possible future wiki system as it need only be a text-based file listing the communities.

[–] fresh@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

So, if cross-posts are not showing up in my feed, then I have to actively look for cross-posts separately in the communities? How would I even know they exist? That's still not what I want. In other words, there are two kinds of cross-posts: (1) redundant posts to overlapping demographics. I don't want to see more than one of these. (2) commentary cross-posts. I want to see these as separate posts.

Sibling communities would hide (1) and not (2).

I like that you're imagining new ways to do this. That's what I'm trying to do too. This brave new world of community created multi-communities honestly sounds a lot like sibling communities to me. There's the question of who is making the multi-communities, and to me the natural response is "the communities themselves". There's less user friction if a community is just already affiliated with a bunch of other communities voluntarily.

[–] metaStatic@kbin.social -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

cross-post automatically

if you cross post to more than 3 communities I'm blocking you, especially if you have more posts than comments.

I don't need my entire front page to be your post thanks.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

That's kind of not the poster's fault.

When a given interface respects the cross posting method, it doesn't show multiple posts, it shows one post with a list of places it was cross posted to.

Unfortunately, not every interface respects that part if federation. Most lemmy apps don't (afaik, none do, but I can't claim to use all of). If kbin via web isn't following that, it isn't that person's fault.

Now, that's different from someone making multiple posts of the same thing because they don't know how to cross post lol.