Perhaps I’ve misunderstood how Lemmy works, but from what I can tell Lemmy is resulting in fragmentation between communities. If I’ve got this wrong, or browsing Lemmy wrong, please correct me!
I’ll try and explain this with an example comparison to Reddit.
As a reddit user I can go to /r/technology and see all posts from any user to the technology subreddit. I can interact with any posts and communicate with anyone on that subreddit.
In Lemmy, I understand that I can browse posts from other instances from Beehaw, for example I could check out /c/[email protected], /c/[email protected], or many of the other technology communities from other instances, but I can’t just open up /c/technology in Beehaw and have a single view across the technology community. There could be posts I’m interested in on the technology@slrpnk instance but I wouldn’t know about it unless I specifically look at it, which adds up to a horrible experience of trying to see the latest tech news and conversation.
This adds up to a huge fragmentation across what was previously a single community.
Have I got this completely wrong?
Do you think this will change over time where one community on a specific instance will gain the market share and all others will evaporate away? And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?
EDIT: commented a reply here: https://beehaw.org/comment/288898. Thanks for the discussion helping me understand what this is (and isnt!)
I think you have got it slightly wrong. You’re correct that you can’t just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you’re subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.
I think your concern is a common one, but what you’re seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.
Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn’t. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they’ll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.
The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.
I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you’re subbed to.
Yes, if. That assumes they all searched for (or even !discovered) all the distributed communities. This would be visible as all communities having the exact same subscriber count.
In practice, most users will only subscribe to one or two communities, and subscriber counts will vary wildly. In practice, there is fragmentation (though that’s neither necessarily a bad thing nor is it meaningfully different from reddit).
That’s an important point and very relevant in the context of the migration from reddit (which would not have happened if spez had only power over one or some instances, not all), and the context of the recent defederation event.
I got the feeling we as a lemmy community should want our communities to be fragmented across many instances. Not sure if more than a handful gives any further advantages, but having only one significant community on one particular instance makes the whole of lemmy very dependent on the administration of that instance.
That would be great! I also hope search and discovery will be improved.
I agree wholeheartedly with @macracanthorhynchus but I also have my own hypothesis about how things will evolve.
The special thing that Forums had that was mostly missing from the centralised reddit subs was the sense of intimacy within the community. Specifically to the extent that you would get to know some of the members despite the anonymity.
The Fediverse allows us to have the best of both worlds in this respect. You’ll pay special attention to the communities you are fond of, while at the same time keeping an eye on the rest.
Anyway, that’s just my half baked prediction, but I hope it comes true!
Agreed!
People keep talking about the appeal of the megacommunities on Reddit, and I’m like… were they really that great? There was so much noise to sift through to get to anything real. Having decent discussions or building communities? Maybe if you’re in a small niche subreddit, but otherwise no.
right? Like you see a top voted comment is full of BS and tried to point out the mistakes or debate/argue, on popular sub it’s nearly impossible as your reply would be buried by other comments that ride the karma wave before you see it. So the best you can do is try to find the reply that maybe says what you want to upvote that and down vote other mindless drone or bots, then hope for the best.
The one great thing about mega communities with long histories is recommendations. I would go to r/movies and search through old “what’s the best [x] movie” a LOT. Or in my city sub, “where’s the best burger”, etc
But yeah, I think the bad mostly outweighs the good.
Ideally yes, but for a more niche community, federation is slower and posts don’t get pushed through. I can see a lot of confusion when someone creates a niche sub because they thought it didn’t exist, when in reality it does, and they were just the first to search for it from their server.
Posts do get pushed through, its just been a period of heavily increased traffic the last week or so, and many instances have had to tame measures to stay online at all, which in many cases has broken or slowed down the propagation.
These are issues that will be resolved in time
Honestly I don’t think it matters, because Ihis exact thing happened after I created m/dryherbvapes, just a few hours before m/vaporents and !vaporents were created. I added them to the sidebar, subscribe and join into discussion on all three.
As far as I am concerned there is room for different communities with their own vibes about the same subject on the Web. I mean it happens in real life so why not?
Anyway kbin has a feature where it recommends similar magazines so that will be a huge opportunity for cross pollination once everything gets indexed fully.
Edit: typo