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 think you got things the right way, however keep in mind that there isn’t any standard yet. There is indeed multiple communities for the same subjects on Reddit, you just have a principal one. Since things are pretty new on here you haven’t major subs emerging. It will eventually be the case I think !
@jon_010 @technology this is the problem of having generalist instances aiming to replace everything that was on Reddit.
This adds up to a huge fragmentation across what was previously a single community.
this is how these things start - there will be fragmentation until one community takes over the majority of the users.
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own “meta communities”.
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
While I haven’t spent time looking at kbin, isn’t that essentially what it does with its ‘magazines’? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.
This would be a huge plus, especially if it could be a server-wide multi. Instance maintainers could create /c/technology@instance.com but make it contain content from a curated list of other federated instances with their own /c/technology or lists could be distributed containing popular technology communities and you could import that list as your /c/technology as a personal multi.
I would really like a /g/ option, where the instance admin can create multis for multiple !gaming instances under a single /g/gaming
This could help curate and avoid just any fedi !community tacking on for nefarious purposes, while allowing users to find all the good !communities under a single multi.
This is the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s going to result in a lot of duplicate posts (and the comments will still be fragmented). I’m following several technology communities and a lot of the posts are posted to each of these communities individually. This has always been my concern with federation (along with server health/durability)
It’s not the worst result, but I don’t know how well it will be received by more mainstream users. You also then have to solve discoverability of these “groups/metas”, and THAT has to be hosted on a federated instance so you could still end up with users confused on whether they should follow beehaws tech group or someone else’s….and round and round we go lol
(Just to be clear - I’m not against federation, it’s just such a starkly different model than the normal web that we really have to adjust our mindset and find truly novel solutions or adjust our expectations)
I think the idea is that in the end only one will “survive”. Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers, whilst technology@lemmy.ml has only 750 subscribers, and that’s the second biggest (unless i got this totally wrong)
Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers
strange, it’s showing me here 1609 subscribers here through kbin, or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?
Idk, but if that’s the case than we have a huge problem lol, because that would mean the users of each instance would tend to prefer that instance’s communities, thus helping fragmentation.
Edit: just checked from lemmy.ml, and it’s showing 15.5k for its community, and 1.62k for beehaw’s I wonder if having something like a “cross-instance counter” is something the developers have in mind
I’m waiting for better control over filtering to be able to see what I want - the duplicate communities are a good example, being able to select all technology instances would be handy. Although will people in each one be posting the same material…perhaps we could have all the comments viewed at once while we’re at it. But that makes you consider what’s the point of having all these instances in the first place.
or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?
I think so, yes (though still learning). From my point of view (lemmy.click, just 83 users):
- https://lemmy.click/c/technology@lemmy.ml - 19 subscribers
- https://lemmy.click/c/technology@beehaw.org - 17 subscribers
- https://lemmy.click/c/technology@slrpnk.net - 1 subscriber
I think this shows the number of lemmy.click accounts subscribed to these remote communities.
But when I open the communities in their home instances, I get a different picture:
- https://lemmy.ml/c/technology@lemmy.ml - 15.5k subscribers
- https://beehaw.org/c/technology@beehaw.org - 19.1k subscribers
- https://slrpnk.net/c/technology@slrpnk.net - 370 subscribers
