A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
I don't think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.
Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community's values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.
I'm not sure how Lemmy works, but over on kbin I can set up my magazine (collection of threads similar to a subreddit) to autofederate content based on certain tags. For example, I run the DwarfFortress magazine, and I have it set up to automatically federate content in the fediverse based on the existence of a #dwarffortress tag. Now, I haven't seen that happen yet, so I'm not 100% if it works or not, but it looks like the option is potentially there.
Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like "best gaming mouse kbin" via Google?
Assuming those posts actually wind up here, yes.
To me this fragmentation is one of the strongest suits. Instead of putting everyone who is interesting in technology together, (which is an very large group of people), you can subdivide people. Take AI/LLMs for example. There's a group of people who is really interested by them and tries to use these technologies as much as possible. Theres also a group of people who is very critical of the harms and negative side effects of LLMs. Instead of mashing them together in a single community, both can now discuss the same news from their own standpoint.
And no, I'm not concerned about filter bubbles. I think the problem is the opposite, the idea that we have to force people in the same space who do not want to be together in the same space. Just like we dont do that in real life, people should gather around with the people they want to be with.
What you need to understand is that "lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit" is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other "reddits".
The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren't "the same one community split fragmented" they're separate communities.
so while I can post in here on [email protected] it's very much the case and obvious to me that it's separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our [email protected] which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.
In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren't the same thing.
I know y'all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don't exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I'm in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn't help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.
tl;dr: they're different communities, not the same community split among instances.
edit: it's also worth noting that us kbinauts aren't even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.
I'm hoping (actually, expecting-- if we're being honest) that features are added to reddit-esque apps like lemmy and kbin that allow you to make personal groups of magazines/communities. This would very nearly solve the fragmentation "problem". Better yet if they add a way to share these personal groups to be imported by others.
Then we would get the benefits that come with decentralization, but without the detriments that come along with it.
It's my 2nd day here. I love fediverse. Imagine that i write to you from mastodon. This thing have a lot of potential.
We are integrated and fragmented at the same time. Mind-blowing but i love this.
It's like writing from twitter to reddit user, this is insane. <3
I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.
You're right on that part. Federations works great with mastodon and its instances made of individuals directly interacting with each other's accounts.
But when it comes to interacting though communities already spread through instances, not only it makes it hard for people to follow all these duplicates, but it threatens the very principle of federation in a certain way. Because most people will eventually subscribe to the biggest community for each subject (tech, nature, photo), which often turns out to be hosted on the biggest instances...and that is centralization once again.
A solution could be for users to gather all the communities they subscribed to around topics. Then your feed would be a mix of these topics' groups and singles /c. Twitter does that similarly with its List feature.
This software is so new, and it has lots of potential.
I can see someone building an extension that aggregates many versions of the same sublemmy into one feed seamlessly, and then the feature being added to the main lemmy code.
This will evolve and improve the more we use it.
Once "multi-reddits" have been defined and implemented in kbin that shouldn't be an issue. I don't know what'll happen with lemmy, but it would probably be in its interest to implement it too.
But they are not "duplicates". [email protected] is about Solarpunk technology etc.
And even for "technology" communities on general purpose instances: the naming is completely arbitrary and also on Reddit there were always communities with overlapping thematic areas.
The problem is not that there are different communities with somewhat overlapping themes (which is absolutely unavoidable) but some strange sense of FOMO because they happen to be named similarly. But that is just a mind-set issue that is IMHO very un-healthy.