Dear European enthusiasts,
We’re excited to grow Europe Pub and need your help to make it thrive! We’re looking for passionate individuals to join us as community builders and moderators.
What we need:
- Community builders to breathe life into our existing communities
- Moderators for country-specific communities who speak the native languages
Why native-speaking moderators are crucial: Europe’s beauty lies in its linguistic diversity. We want to replicate this diversity in our country-specific communities. Our goal is to ensure that every European can participate in discussions using their native language. This approach will make Europe Pub truly inclusive and representative of our continent’s rich tapestry of languages and cultures.
This is your chance to contribute to the fediverse movement and create a truly European social network. Let’s break free from centralized American social media and build something that represents our diverse continent.
Whether you’re passionate about European culture, politics, or simply want to connect with fellow Europeans, we’d love to have you on board. No technical expertise required – just enthusiasm, a love for Europe, and fluency in your native European language!
If you’re interested in helping shape Europe Pub, please comment below or send me a message.
Let’s work together to create a vibrant, inclusive space! 🇪🇺
Hello,
Copy pasting what I put in another post on [email protected]
My personal stance on this is that
If rules, moderation policies and admin policies are similar, there should only be one community on a single topic while we have a userbase below 100k
This allows for [email protected] and [email protected] to coexist, as there is a reason for them to (different moderation policies). It’s similar for [email protected] and [email protected], as those communities have different principles and perspectives on their topic.
This suggests to consolidate communities like [email protected] and [email protected]
Another recent example is
These three communities have similar rules, similar moderation and admin policies. They should be consolidated. And I know this is a very controversial topic, but I made a longer post recently on [email protected] for people interested.
In summary, my main argument is that
To take a recent example
https://jlai.lu/post/16318139/13038429
There is a natural tendency of “one community emerges as the main one” on several topics
If one community does not emerge as the main one, it’s usually because two or more regular posters maintain both communities active by posting to their preferred community.
So, my suggestions are to consolidate similar communities. This single decision will not make this platform similar to Reddit. On Reddit, you had no way to complain about power tripping mods, there were no public modlogs, and discourse criticizing the mods or the admins would get silenced.
Here, we have [email protected], and recent examples have shown that the community can actually resist power tripping: https://feddit.org/post/7025680/4263481.
If the mods of the consolidated community start to power trip, document this on [email protected] and reorganize on the alternative communities. If not, stay on that one community, to foster more active conversations and posts.
That’s the theory we encourage on [email protected], feel free to join us there to discuss this further.
Open to discussion on this.
I see it like that:
Consolidation leads to centralization, and centralization creates power structures that go against the core principles of the Fediverse. If too many users concentrate in a single community, it gives disproportionate influence to a small group of admins and moderators. If that community’s instance goes down (as we saw with feddit.de) or if those in charge abuse their power, the entire structure can be destabilized. That’s precisely the kind of problem the Fediverse was built to avoid.
The idea of migrating communities when moderation becomes problematic sounds good in theory, but in practice, it rarely works, especially as the network scales up. It’s also cumbersome. People don’t want to uproot and start over repeatedly, and large communities don’t just “move” smoothly. Instead, they tend to fracture, lose engagement, or remain stuck under poor leadership.
I get that, but this feels like a problem that should be solved at the platform level rather than by consolidating communities. People should be able to subscribe to multiple similar communities across different instances, and the feed algorithm should be able to detect and bundle similar posts across these communities. However, it should not decide which content is “best”. It should simply organize the feed more efficiently without interfering with visibility.
In the end, this is the ongoing dilemma of decentralization: Do we prioritize distribution of power, or do we focus on ease of use? There’s no perfect answer, but we should aim for a balance rather than rushing to consolidate.
Thank you for your comment
People left [email protected] after the power tripping: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/29606682. [email protected] became the most active community
[email protected] is also another example: https://feddit.org/post/7025680/4263481
This is not going to happen any time soon for Lemmy, and even though Piefed has feeds, the issue stays the same: if a question about European luggage is listed on 3 different communities, people are not going to copy paste their answers in the 3 communities, leading to discussion splintering
I am in favor of having one community, [email protected] , due to the good track record of the instance admins.
Should the mods start power tripping, people can organize on [email protected]
Firstly, [email protected] still has 2,500 subscribers, while [email protected] only has 1,500 at this point. Additionally, the moderators are now directing users to [email protected], which has even fewer subscribers (around 200), as mentioned in this post. Rather than a clean transition, this situation has resulted in a fractured community.
Secondly, in this case, the issue was malicious moderation. Users left because of bad mod behavior, but the real concern remains: admins have the final say. If an admin decides to power trip, the entire community—and potentially the whole instance—falls under their control.
This brings us back to the exact problem Reddit has. As long as the company aligned with community interests, it could hold rogue moderators accountable. But once Reddit had a financial or ideological agenda, entire communities were left powerless.
In contrast, a decentralized approach with similar communities on different instances offers a natural fail-safe. If one instance becomes problematic, users can easily regroup on other similar communities rather than having to start from scratch. This ensures continuity and resilience rather than the all-or-nothing risk of centralization.
If Lemmy’s feed algorithm can bundle similar posts, it can also bundle comments. This is a matter of software development, not an inherent flaw in decentralization. Whether or not this happens depends on developer support, but it’s absolutely possible and could even be implemented in frontend apps like Voyager or Thunder.
The question isn’t whether consolidation is the only way to improve discussion efficiency—it’s whether it’s the best way. And given the risks of power concentration, it seems clear that a better solution lies in improving the tools rather than weakening decentralization.
I stand by my position, but I’ll leave this discussion open for others to weigh in. Let’s see what the broader community thinks.
Piefed has such a feature now https://europe.pub/post/44083
Piefed still doesn’t have mobile apps.
They still sit at 331 monthly active users. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7
Lemmy has 54781: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7
Are you planning to switch your instance to Piefed?
No I don’t. Just wanted to say it’s possible and we should take that as inspiration.
Also why does it matter how many users they have or an App? It’s still a working feature and I really support this.
It matters because this means that only 0.6% of the userbase (it’s even less, as Mbin also have a few hundreds users, but whatever) can use that feature.
The 99.4% of the userbase is still going to experience what the other commenter has reported: https://feddit.org/comment/5567697 and that you choose to ignore
May I ask you why you’re not using a micro blogging Fediverse platform, like Mastodon or Sharkey? On these, decentralization is maximal, as every person post on their own to the general feed.
Lemmy/Reddit format of communities/subreddits relies on people to collaborate at some point. The value of that format compared to microblogging is the crowd sourced curation (votes) and additional input (comments). Votes and comments require the posts to be created once, so that users can interact with it once.
There are plenty of examples recently, but let’s take this one: https://feddit.nl/post/30955168 484 votes, 28 comments
People only comment once on a given topic, so crossposting on similar communities splinters the conversation
What are the differences between
Except that the first one is more active? I crosspost most of the content you post on the second to the first, you crosspost some of the content I post to the first to the second.