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/technology@slrpnk.net, /c/tech@lemmy.fmhy.ml, 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 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.
Those are two different communities. The same as they would be on Reddit. Literally different names.
Communities are hosted on one a synced with others. So technology will be the same on all servers as long as they haven’t defederated each other.
I don’t think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn’t dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.
Where your account is hosted and which communities you subscribe to doesn’t have to overlap at all. For instance, I’m on VLemmy but almost all of my subbed communities are on Beehaw.
I also think it may be a feature rather than a bug to have multiple communities for each topic. Each individual community can build its own sense of identity, guidelines, and norms. I’m personally feeling refreshed by the smaller volume of posts and comments in a way that encourages me to engage. Reddit had become very passive for me due to the sheer size of everything.
