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I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are different names

I think this is exactly what OP is trying to point out - they are two different communities, when on reddit there would only be one - therefore the fragmentation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

on reddit there would only be one

The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for "Blue Protocol", apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.

The phenomenon exists for all systems where there is no central authority deciding names and categories, which is true for both reddit and lemmy. Individual users can decide to create a new group regardless of existing groups, for a variety of reasons. This naturally leads to some duplicates.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for “Blue Protocol”, apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.

they were all different names, there could be only one BlueProtocol.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And as sunaurus said, they all have different names on Lemmy too, once you realize you need to count the entire identifier and not just the part before the @.

On reddit you'd have /r/tech and /r/technology, both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. On Lemmy you'll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they'll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On Lemmy you’ll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names.

on reddit you have r/tech and r/technology, the analogue on lemmy would be /c/tech@instance1, /c/tech@instance2, ..., /c/technology@instance1, /c/technology@instance2, ... - the chance for fragmentation is much greater.

Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they’ll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.

Agreed. This is exactly what I've been saying as well.

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