Beehaw's number of communities, and why it makes sense
Beehaw's number of communities, and why it makes sense
When you look at https://beehaw.org/communities, you can see that there are only a few communities, but they are diverse enough to cover most of the topics you would have to discuss on the Internet.
I sometimes think that could be a model we could try to replicate across several instances:
- technology: !technology@lemmy.world
- gaming: !games@sh.itjust.works
- chat: !casualconversation@lemm.ee
- etc.
It would allow to aggregate people around a few core communities and avoid dispersion and fragmentation. Of course, it would need some agreements in the community, and some people would probably want to keep their community as "the main one" opposed to the other, but that could still be valuable.
What do you think?
Hmm, not sure I fully understand. Are you suggesting that each instance should limit the number of communities to a few general ones, or that the Lemmy network as a whole should limit the number of duplicate general communities?
That's more or less the idea. Fragmentation doesn't really benefit us except when the topic is that popular that conversations can happen in parallel (technology or news for instance)
Isn't Beehaw approach the opposite of what Fediverse stands for? Many fragmented communities, but still interconnected. Lemmy specifically needs a way for individual users to group all these similar communities (and there are many proposals for that) as opposed to more centralization.
I shared my thoughts on Beehaw approach in more detail here: https://lemmy.zip/comment/2570691
I wouldn't say they are the opposite, they are still federated with a lots of instance, just not LW and SJW.
About the grouping of communities, that would be an improvement, but at the same time, wouldn't that be strange for new joiners to have to group a few communities on the same topic while they only want to follow it?
I know it's a balance between centralization and decentralization, but sometimes I feel we went a step too far in the latter.
For instance, if !databreaches@lemmy.zip became the one reference community on data breaches, that would be nice, we probably don't need a community on this topic on 4 other instances
Success of grouping entirely depends on the technical implementation. And new user experience is something that Fediverse sucks at as a whole. On Lemmy, introducing new users to groups could be as simple as suggesting pre-created groups on identically named communities, they can follow with a single click. Which would cover 95% of people coming from Reddit. And for the rest 5% that want more tailored experience could create custom groups.
If !databreaches@lemmy.zip became the reference community, then it's subject to all the federation/defederation of
lemmy.zip, rules oflemmy.zipand laws oflemmy.ziphost server and applying it to the whole Fediverse.