Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from [email protected] , it’s still in [email protected] )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
Hello,
Thank you for your comment.
I agree with the fact that a story of post should only exist once, as you said. I guess the remaining question is what to do where there are two communities for the same topic.
I have a good example that I just stumbled upon: [email protected] is the most active community about maps, has usually one post per day every day for the last few months. Once in a while, someone posts on [email protected], and they instantly get a lot more comments than the first community.
[email protected] is also quite active, despite not being on LW.
Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, [email protected] is vastly different from doing it in, say, [email protected], even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.