I’m new here, and have been looking into different communities to subscribe to, it’s pretty difficult to decide which ones to subscribe to when theres often the same community on more than one server. (Example: internetisbeautiful on @feddit.de, @lemmy.ee, @lemmy.ml)

I’m not super savvy but couldn’t they merge them and have the community hosted as mirrors of each other on both for redundancy? If I’m wrong, do correct me, again, not super savvy and also new here.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    5 hours ago

    Let’s say there’s a group of people in your hometown who like dogs. They will talk about dog thing this, dog thing that, probably something local. Now you travel to another town and they too have a group that likes dogs. They will talk about dog things too, but probably it’ll be different dog things that are also specific to their location.

    You have the option to join both dog communities without physically traveling from one town to another. You can even choose not to join a dog group in another town that only like to talk about dog fighting for example.

    There is no “tech savvy” required here. You signed up in a town that has communities there, you can see communities from other towns, and you can choose to join them all, some, or none. It’s up to you.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

  • _NetNomad@fedia.io
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    12 hours ago

    you can just subscribe to them all. that way, if one instance goes down, or dies out, or makes nonsensical moderation decisions, you still have the others. it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

    • jef@lemm.eeOP
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      2 hours ago

      I definetly understand the benifits of this, but a lot of these communities post the same or a lot of duplicate content.

      Also didn’t think about the nonsensical moderation in one community, so maybe mirroring them wouldn’t be that great of an idea.

      • Dil@is.hardlywork.ing
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        2 hours ago

        possible in those cases the instances have each other blocked so they have duplicates of the community they cant access

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    Subscribe to all of them. It won’t be a problem.

    It’s like if you followed #s of the same thing on Instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, and whatever the equivalent of # is on Facebook, then a reddit sub with the same name. Different populations and user bases, but that’s a good thing.

    There’s some degree of consolidation that happens, particularly when one community is on a bigger instance and would be better served by being hosted elsewhere. But there’s not really any barriers to using multiple. If you crosspost, you have better chances of it being seen anyway, and you’ll get access to any responses. If you’re wanting to comment, then the OP that crossposted is going to get your response no matter which ones it’s in.

    Only drawback is that your comment in one won’t show in the others unless you copy/paste it. Which is perfectly valid if you want to, but most people would see your comment eventually anyway, so the conversation will still happen if it would have in the first place.

    I kinda had issues adapting to it myself, but now I tend to prefer it when communities are spread out, because every instance has its own vibe usually. So you get different kinds of discussions than you would if there was only one community on one instance.

    Some subjects end up needing a single community just to make it easier to find, but it’s pretty rare imo.

  • OpenStars@piefed.social
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    13 hours ago

    PieFed can do this, but Lemmy cannot. There is no official app support for PieFed yet, though testing is underway with Thunder so perhaps soon - for now check out PieFed.social in a web browser, and see the Topic areas, or the new user customizable and shareable Feeds. e.g., Arts & Crafts.

    • Fulano_B3Ltrano@piefed.social
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      12 hours ago

      Hello, I’m not the owner of this post, but I made a PieFed account, based on what you said months ago. I find the extra features really nice! I just have one question: how do I know if I’m getting notifications from communities?

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        12 hours ago

        Go to the community, e.g. !mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe, and just to the right of the name, you’ll see a bell icon. If that has a slash through it, which it should by default, then you will NOT receive notifications for that content. Toggle it to ON if you want them though.

        I have greatly reduced my number of notifications from communities, since they can really pile up, especially for high-volume communities, and all the more so if you don’t check them multiple times a day. But for very rarely posted to communities, they can be a great way to ensure that you won’t miss something by other ways of reading, like your Subscribed or one of the Topic Feeds, which just recently were made to become user customizable and also shareable.

        You can also sign up to receive notifications for Feeds too. Or a user. Or a post - most anything really. You can also toggle OFF notifications for a post or comment that people keep bothering you with, without having to delete it (this happened to me a couple times, once on Hexbear.net and again in lemmygrad.ml).

        There are some quirks that PieFed still needs to fix, but overall I’m so happy with it! I’m glad you are enjoying it as well. Keep us all updated, in communities like this one, if you have other questions or feedback or anything - the Fediverse is getting active again all of a sudden, with all the enshittification happening on Reddit recently!:-)

  • Cris@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Other people have already given more than enough answers, but welcome! I’m glad you’re here 😊

  • Snoopy@piefed.social
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    13 hours ago

    Well, that’s part of the decentralisation with its pros and cons. And that’s what i enjoy about the Verse (lemmy, mbin, piefed…)

    • cons : multiple communities with the same name. People are dispersed.
    • pro : no centralised decision for all the Verse. Several flavor.

    You can chose them based on :

    • the number of comments and posts.
    • the moderation team by checking the modlog of their community. Do you agree with their value ? How is it managed ?
    • people. Do you fell well there ? Or do you prefer there ? Only time can tell you :)

    Another idea :

    • Use an app that support multi-communities
    • Create a Piefed account so you can benefit from multi-community : feed. Create a feed, and put those similar community in one place. On few cross-post, they also regroup comment in one place. It’s still a new software but i enjoy it a lot. :)
    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      11 hours ago

      The feeds are also (now), in addition to being user customizable, shareable as well. So yes you can create your own, but also you may not have to, and instead just find one already made and maintained by someone else with similar preferences:-).

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      11 hours ago

      It is helpful to have posts from multiple communities delivered to you though, in a conjoined “Feed” - e.g. here is an example of a PieFed one called “Fediverse”. Personally I disagree with not showing the full name of the community in the feed like that, but when you click on an actual post you see at the top the entire thing including what instance it is located on (and for some, the little icons can differ as well, which I particularly see for communities located on Beehaw, which really helps to distinguish e.g. technology on Beehaw from technology on Lemmy.World, etc.).

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
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    13 hours ago

    Consolidation sometimes happens, but sometimes doesn’t for certain reasons, such as a community being abandoned, or different visions for a similar topic.

    Personally I would recommend picking the most popular community or the one that seems to appeal to you the most, and only posting in that one, while staying subscribed to the others (if they are active) to keep abreast of that content and be able to participate in the comments if you desire.

  • cm0002@lemmy.cafe
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    13 hours ago

    Yes and no, this topic comes up fairly frequently, and generally…nobody knows the best solution forward LMAO

    piefed.social is a Lemmy “competitor” and is intended to be fully interoperable, but in practice it hasn’t matured yet and it’s interoperability with the Lemmy-verse is decent but has its quirks

    But a big thing there is they have a multi sub type feature to combine comms like that

    But some people also like the multiple comms, because they can have different viewpoints and culture.

    Like lemmy.ml is a huge Tankie instance and their c/memes comms moderation skew towards censoring of comments and posts critical of Russia/China/NK and allows political memes

    Where as c/meme on .world have banished most political memes directing them to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world instead

    • freamon@preferred.social
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      11 hours ago

      PieFed is just a Fediverse platform that aims to inter-op with Lemmy in much the same way that it aims to inter-op with any other Group-based platform (MBIN, PeerTube, NodeBB, Wordpress).

      Lemmy’s “quirks” are the reason why your account won’t see Polls from MBIN, or channels from PeerTube, or posts from NodeBB, or backfilled content from Wordpress.

      It’s not my intent to criticise Lemmy, but these are verifiable problems, whereas it doesn’t seem fair to criticise PieFed for problems that you can’t clearly remember.

      • cm0002@lemmy.cafe
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        11 hours ago

        It wasn’t my intent to criticize Piefed either, just trying to not over sell it to new users, I’d rather not them be thinking it’s a perfect drop-in replacement, and then have a sour taste in their mouth when they run into an issue

        • Snoopy@piefed.social
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          6 hours ago

          Well i think Piefed is pretty close to being a drop-in remplacement.

          It’s true there are several missing components. however, i recall it was the same for Lemmy 1,5 year ago. And Piefed is catching up in few months.

          How close ? Let’s sum up :)

          On some part, Piefed clearly outmatch Lemmy on several area :

          • admin/moderation board
          • notification (the ability to chose a post/comment/community to follow/unfollow)
          • feed (multi-community)
          • federation with the fediverse
          • tag (to find more related content based on keyword)

          maybe more thing that i don’t know about

          some part are missing for Piefed :

          • mobile app support (but the web mobile is good + coming soon)
          • lacks of theme
          • cross-post
          • notification board (repport/post/coms/idea aren’t separated)
          • comment/post/moderation view
          • media management (lemmy doesn’t have one yet, iceshrimp is the best on that area)

          There are rough edge. Even if some part are missing, it is quite a good experience. In a few months they did lot progress. :)

            • Snoopy@piefed.social
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              3 hours ago

              True, i know that users prefers mobile app over web mobile maily due to its navigation.

              Anyway two mobile app are upcoming :

              • pferd (fork of thunder)
              • interstellar (to confirm)

              For me, the most deal breaker are post/comment view and mod view + notification board. Because as a mod/user, i use them a lot. They are all in development, it’s good, it will take some time. :)

              Over time i noticed that i prefer the mobile version of Fediverse software. I use the web mobile version for IceShrimp, Lemmy, Piefed. The only app i use is mastodon (fedilab)

              The web mobile provide me a better experience : lot features, better sync, mod tool, comment view…it depends a lot on app UI : swipe controle, draft, create post button, filters…

      • cm0002@lemmy.cafe
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        12 hours ago

        Lol I’m trying it out, davel un-instance-banned me after that meme went live and then banned me from each comm individually instead, so they could brigade my posts/comments

        Soooo I decided to try out .cafe since they defed from the entire triad lolol

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
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          11 hours ago

          Tbf, federation delays occur for every instance - and in particular Lemmy.World is well known for how they cause them.

          OTOH, the flagship instance PieFed.social does have quite a bit more of those than I’ve typically seen on any Lemmy instances. Here is a list of other PieFed instances readily available to join. They won’t have features be added as quickly, but might be more stable.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        11 hours ago

        Mostly relating to small matters of polish. Like there’s a post preview feature, but that isn’t provided (yet) for comments.

        One super annoying feature is when you receive a notification for something that you cannot actually see. Sometimes it relates to all the variety of auto-collapsing or auto-hiding of comments (therefore I turned all of that off), but e.g. you can receive a notification from someone that you have added to your block list if they reply to you, yet you will then be directed to a page displaying an error (when instead, that notification itself should have been removed by the PieFed backend).

        Oh, and searching is crap (tbf, Reddit’s is too? However, Lemmy’s is fairly great, and about to get even better by separating out post titles I hear), plus while cross-posts are properly joined together, you cannot actually initiate a cross-post from PieFed.

        PieFed is great for a new person to join the Fediverse, or for an old hand (who knows how to go to Lemmy in order to get around these limitations) to use as a daily driver, but it hasn’t reached feature parity yet with Lemmy.

        OTOH, it has already surpassed Lemmy in so many ways, and Lemmy is not without its quirks as well. Chief among those might be how authoritarian it is - there is a modlog, but no modmail, and the account name of the mod who performed an action is actively hidden, replaced with just “mod”. Also the “instance blocking” feature is horribly misnamed, as it only acts as a community mute, whereas in contrast, PieFed has a true instance blocking feature that I use to block all users from lemmy.ml, regardless of what community or instance they are posting to. No need for an instance admin or defederation or anything - and you can reverse it anytime to boot! That one feature alone is what enticed me to join it, when it was much less developed - that feature is so helpful!

        As are the hashtags, categories of communities, keyword filtering, and the list just goes on and on. Ahem, but yes nothing is perfect, and it does have quirks, some of which can be quite annoying. Fortunately the pace of development is extremely quick, and the dev very friendly and responsive.