Technology

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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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] 1 points 2 years ago

There's 2 things to consider.

First since this is all relatively new there's a bit of a gold rush for starting communities, eventually a couple of major communities across instances will emerge for different topics and those will stick, this will make things a bit less impractical from the point of view of an average user.

Second is if we ever get functionality on lemmy to create the equivalent of a multireddit, where you can group as many communities as you want into a single curated view (either for yourself or shared to the instance) then this becomes a non-issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Bluesky is working on a fix. They have a global identity system where you can move all your data (posts, likes, followers, blocks) to another instance if you get banned. The only thing that changes is your handle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Fragmentation is certainly a problem if you’re looking for Reddit-style cohesive communities, how much of a problem it is remains to be seen in my opinion. The risk with trying to do things the Reddit way is that one or two large instances become dominant and you’ve just got Reddit all over again.

One potential solution that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the concept of “meta communities” - collections of smaller related communities across the fediverse that can be subscribed to and interacted with as if they were one, sort of like multi-Reddits. Users could potentially vote on a smaller community being admitted into the meta community, or there could be some other requirement. It could even be done locally by the user through a browser extension. It’s not perfect but it’s maybe something to explore.

Alternatively we just get used to more compact communities again. Let’s be honest - do we really have to know everything, all of the time?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn't matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I'll just get them all in my feed. I'm following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn't care less where it comes from, as long as I'm following I'm good to go.

There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.

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