Pluralistic: The online community trilemma

[eah@programming.dev]

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[emb@lemmy.world]

Key quote for the curious:

They [the paper he's discussing] conclude that there's a community-member's "trilemma": a set of three priorities that can never be fully satisfied by any group. The trilemma consists of users' need to find:

a) A community of like-minded people;

b) Useful information; and

c) The largest possible audience.

The thing that puts the "lemma" in this "trilemma" is that any given group can only satisfy two of these three needs. It's hard to establish the kinds of intimate, high-trust bonds with the members of a giant, high-traffic group, but your small, chummy circle of pals might not be big enough to include people who have the information you're seeking.

[lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org]

This, worded in far more technical terms than I had understood back at the time, is one of the reasons why I've always opposed the idea of "merging" communities in the Fediverse. Merging views is fine, but merging the communities themselves and all that this means (focus, themes, memberships, rules, censorships, timezones...) is just Not.

[tyler@programming.dev]

I would say that’s not actually the key quote at all, especially since the author states that many times finding a smaller audience is the goal.

[emb@lemmy.world]

It's at least something to explain what the title's referencing. Acknowleding that smaller audiences are often preferred doesn't really seem at odds with that. It just points to A and B having higher priority than C, right?

But people should just read the article, it's pretty quick and has more context than the quote.

[julian@activitypub.space]

> @emb@lemmy.world said in Pluralistic: The online community trilemma:
>
> a) A community of like-minded people;
>
> b) Useful information; and
>
> c) The largest possible audience.

Calling it now. Join @fediverse@lemmy.world to discuss the fediverse. Join the smaller @fediverse@piefed.social to discuss the fediverse and rag on tankies.

/s?

[fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net]

We need a mature multireddit like function, and for similar communities across instances to be pre-merged. A function to display comments on the same post cross posted or parallel posted on one page would be useful too. That would help with fragmentation while allowing communities to be independent underneath

[cmlvi@lemmy.world]

Yeah, this would be good in my mind. I don't even care if it's just the communities my instance is federated with only; I would imagine I land with an instance that shares my values, so their federation I'd be OK with (hypothetically). I just don't want to feel like I'm missing out by being somewhere else and not knowing/being aware of a portion of the community. I want the discussion just as much as I want the information presented.

[julian@activitypub.space]

The potential for abuse or culture clash comes when these disparate (yet related) communities are combined.

From a user perspective it may make sense to expose "related discussions" that you can browse to. Keeping the discussions separate yet linked could be a workable compromise.