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 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.