One of the biggest issues I’m having trouble getting past with Lemmy is not knowing which communities to subscribe to.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
Is there a way to “clump” these communities together so I can just subscribe to one “multi-community” that houses the posts from all of them?
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What about all of the other technology communities? Forums, Web sites, chat rooms, books, magazines, local clubs? We need a way to clump them all together and subscribe to them all at once.
You start with a false premise:
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
r/technology was never the only technology subreddit. There was retro, retrotechnology, who knows perhaps something like bambootechnology, cartechnology, etc. So you never had that experience. You had the same experience you would and do have here, except there it was tinted with a veil of capitalism to keep you submissive. What you are seeing now, is the normal, always has been (insert “always has been” meme). The “big pharmas” of the internet are actually the outlier.
As for the task of “clumping” those communities, I’d surmise in the “content fetching” form that would be the task of a community aggregator, like lemmy itself if eventually a “lists” feature is added, or if communities are allowed to follow each other. Or, if we keep the cross-aggregation separate from the content posting, so that it’s possible to do both or either witout requiring a super VPS, maybe a webring could do it. I remember webrings from the 90s. They were cool.
I’m hoping for two features: Let communities “follow” other communities - so one community’s content also shows up on the other. And let me group communities together on my personal feed, if they don’t want to follow each other for some reason. For now, I stay mostly on the home page, which aggregates everything - but I’d much prefer to be able to browse by topic and still have some aggregation.
I hope some functionality like that will show up purely because I need this question to stop appearing every 3 minutes.
Yes, you’ll subscribe to 10 technology subs. Oh no the humanity.
I, too, am annoyed by this one. It’s like people forgot that reddit had multiple tech subs too, you just picked the biggest one usually. This is no different, just nothing is big yet. Maybe its that last part that bothers people.
I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic “technology”, and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we’ll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.
Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let’s you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.
Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.
Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the “metacommunities” they think they want.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it’s not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.
Subscribing to 10 technology communities will likely get you a much, much more vibrant experience than just subbing to r/technology. People actually, you know, discuss things in smaller spaces, rather than just drop drive-by comments that no one will ever read.
Or it’ll get you a dozen dupes of every submission.
As Lemmy grows, communities on certain servers will die out and some will accumulate all the users. I think the problem will die out eventually.
Though, I think there should be some way to migrate users of a community to a new server. Sounds hard to implement but maybe doable.
Just subscribe to all of them if you’re that worried about missing something. It’s really not that complicated.
Also, stop worrying about reenacting your Reddit experience. Lemmy is not Reddit. Figure out what you like about Lemmy and focus on enhancing that instead of stressing about forcing Lemmy into your preconceived notion of what it should be.
This is pretty much what I’m doing.
If sub.rehab shows 5 threadiverse alternatives for a subreddit, I’ll have a look at each and often sub to 2-3 with the highest subscriber count/posts I like. I’ll then monitor them over time to see which, if any, to unsub from.
