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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

So if I understand you, Lemmy would benefit from a grouping above /c that’s not instance related? Like Usenet had the rec.cats group which spawned rec.cats.siamese? So maybe a /u universe? If I wanted to read about television I could go to u/television which could merge feeds of c/television@piefed.social and c/television@lemmy.world and any other c/television@.? I could see possibilities of abuse but we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Maybe a /u could be an opt in thing with a manager of some kind to prevent unrelated /c’s from randomly joining.

Predictably insightful.

multiple groups that prioritize different paired corners of this people-information-scale triangle

Fact remains that we’re struggling mainly with the scale corner here.

Yeah the article is good.

Piefed has a multireddit like function in personal and public feeds. It helps a lot with similar communities.

Piefed has a multireddit like function in personal and public feeds. It helps a lot with similar communities.

https://piefed.world for an instance managed by the Lemmy.world team