As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more recently is the effects of premature fragmentation.
Like so many things, it boils down to a problem of discovery. By discovery, I mean the user’s ability to find posts and topics that they want to read and engage with.
If lemmy had 10 users, we would not need separate topics. It’d probably be a few posts a day, tops, and it’d be easy enough to just scan through and see if anything of interest was being discussed. That could probably scale up a bit - let’s call it 100 users just for discussion. 100 users, 10-15 posts per day. Somewhere beyond that, you’d probably want to start some kind of classification. It would need to be at a fairly high level, like tech and politics. I’m thinking of things like 90s era slashdot. The point I’m making is that 1000 users would be too few to fragment the tech topic/tag into separate operating systems, much less specific flavors or versions of Linux.
My point is this: picture a growth curve. From biology and general network theory we would expect the growth curve of a successful service or community to grow exponentially. In the early part of growth, the exponential curve can appear linear - it can take time for the network effect to really kick in. Things like the Reddit exit can create a brief non-linearity, but until you hit the hockey stick part it’s just steady growth. Let’s call this function U(t) for users as a function of time.
Now let’s think about growth in the number of communities. From the above, and using discoverability as our fitness function, we’d expect them to grow as a function of the number of users. As the number of users goes up, both the number of and diversity in the posts go up, meaning we need additional metadata to find “our” content easily. Let’s call this one C(t) for communities as a function of time.
My thought right now is that a fitness function would discover that U(t) >> C(t). I’m not going to get a lot more specific because it’s just a thought but I suspect that there’s be some relationship between inter-topic and intra-topic diversity (and the overall information diversity of the service).
What I’m getting to is that it may be that one of the strengths of a service like lemmy, which allows for an almost unlimited expansion of communities including duplications, is not applying the concept of a fitness function, and actually can make things harder to discover and thus the service harder to use, reducing the ability to recruit and retain users. It reduces the average number of posts per topic and increases noise both in search and in the feed. I’ve ended up defaulting my clients to basically showing /all and sorting by recent just to make sure I’m not missing anything interesting, then blocking communities one by one. That’s not sustainable or friendly to more casual users. It’s definitely not the Apollo-on-Reddit kind of UX.
I’m not sure what can or should be done, given both the architecture and philosophy. I’m just thinking about how things like network theory can inform how this sort of thing can be optimized.
I made a similar post about this a few days ago. I’m not sure if you were inspired by that post or if there’s just something in the water. Overall, I believe that activity creates activity in a snowball effect. For small sites like Lemmy or other fedi groups, I think having so many dead, bot-driven communities hurts the overall activity of the group as a whole.
I browse /all/new pretty much exclusively, and I see all the time posts in communities made for specific TV shows, made by the same person every time, getting zero traffic or engagement. The communities themselves usually have only a few subscribers. Just to address the elephant in the room, I think this type of behavior is carried entirely from Reddit refugees who read online and thought that Lemmy was a 1:1 substitution for Reddit, without realizing that the Fediverse’s user base is just a percentage as Reddit’s, and that fractalizing groups into such specific topics out the gate hurts discovery and engagement.
Ha, this is me. I did exactly that (with a community for the TV show Andor) and am guilty of the behaviour you describe.
I’ve probably been thinking along the same lines as you and OP though, 'cos I deleted the community a couple of days ago. I realized that if I had something more to say about that show, it doesn’t belong in it’s own niche community, or ‘Star Wars TV’, or ‘Star Wars’, or even ‘Television’. Perhaps a ‘Movies&TV’ comm, although - at this rate - maybe even ‘entertainment’ would be best.
I’m starting to think that instances that limit community creation to admins have the right idea (e.g. Beehaw, or - to use a non-federated example - tildes).
Some instances have started ‘Community Teams’, but I sense that anytime they discover a dead community, their instinct is to find ways to promote it, get new mods, drive engagement etc, whereas I’m more of the opinion that they should be nuked and consolidated (along the lines of what the ‘cooking’ communities have tried to do, I suppose).
Honestly I have no idea these days. I don’t directly remember reading that post but I certainly may have and I have no problem crediting you with it.
I’ve encountered and complained about the problem from a UX perspective pretty much since coming over. It’s obviously not that I can’t figure it out, it’s that I’ve reached the point that I no longer think I should have to. I remember when I first started walking around university computer science departments and being surprised that about 90% of the computers were Macs and when I would talk to a CA professor with (say) a Windows convertible laptop (when those were brand new) they’d say how much they hated it because of how much work it took. I ended up on exactly the same page, after having started using Linux in 1994 when just getting X Windows running was a feat.
Now look at the average non-technical reddit user. They’re going to bail as soon as they realize they have no idea how to choose a server. Even after that, they’ll have 10 /politics to choose from.
In any case, I started to think about it from a network theory perspective. Let’s say we’re going to use some kind of preferential attachment network (PAN), like Google used when it launched. New nodes will preferentially attach to already more popular nodes. That’s (in a very broad brush sense) the way the Internet and social networks grow. If I want to read /politics, I want the canonical one, not the one with one post from six months ago.
The same approach would potentially apply to the user wanting to make a post. They’ll want to make their post where it’ll get views (obviously, because even if we’re not competing for karma we wouldn’t bother to post if we didn’t want it seen. Same discovery problem.
So the cost of building a PAN is going to be dominated by the cost of a new node finding its preferred attachments. That’s what goes up with fragmentation, and that’s what I think would dictate the fitness function in the evolutionary model I was proposing.
If you write it up, I’ll work on it but want to be co-author :)