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!)
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Defederation was always going to be at risk when you have different user bases with different values interacting with each other.
Look at email. The standard is open, but servers won’t process email from different domains because those domains are known to be spam only. I expect Lemmy is going to be similar.
Email-server are even working with a whitelist, so even a more radical choice, just to keep every random user from spinning up their own servers and spamming everyone else without any limits.
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.
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.I think some of the difficulty right now is on the presentation side. It may not be as noticable of an issue if we had a way to aggregate and view posts from related communities in a single consolidated view. I’m hoping the tooling around this will improve over time.
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 !
That’s the point! If you look at Reddit and choose an argument, say for example “pc building subreddit”, you could find dozens of subreddit related to that topics. There are 1 or 2 that have the majority of good contents and users, but this happens over times.
Exactly: r/baseball and r/MLB, r/hockey and r/NHL, the 50 Linux subreddits, it goes on and on. Fragmentation is far from a fediverse innovation.
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 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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We’ve had Usenet, Forum, IIM, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, etc. etc. They’ve all kind of started out fragmented but over time people naturally built up their communities and figured out what worked.
Kbin and Lemmy aren’t that much different from Usenet or Forums, its just the terminology that is messing people up.
On Usenet communities ended up getting split up because people just really liked to spin off sub groups so you start with comp.technology, then comp.technology.linux, comp.technology.linux.ubuntu etc etc etc.
Forums were always fragmented communities. I have ForumA with these threads and ForumB with these threads, ForumB will never see the posts from ForumA unless they go to that website to see them (and vice versa).
In the Fediverse, sure communities might end up fragmented because each instance has a @technology BUT the benefit is I am on InstanceA and you are on InstanceB and as long as we are federated you can see all of the content from my instance and i can see all the content from yours.
Now, that all being said… One feature I am pushing for to get added to kbin is something along the lines of a multi-subreddit. That way you can set up technology@lemmy.world technology@beehaw.org technology@kbin.social etc to be in this multi-subreddit so as a user you will only see posts from @technology Users don’t want to mess with 50 different tech communities but if we had a multi-subreddit feature that blends them all together so it only appeared as @technology I think it would win a lot more people over.
I spun up my own kbin instance so I can hopefully start helping with the development of features (and to lessen the load for other instances). The two features I’m hankering for at the moment are API support so I can write some content aggregator bots and the multi-subbredit feature.
Anyways that is my rant? tedtalk™? Idk, hopefully all of that made sense to someone out there.
How would posting with multi-subreddit work? Would it post copies to everything? Or would you still just post to one of them?
Posting would work just as it works now, the difference is how easy you can view the different communities. The idea is that it’s just like if you were for example just subscribed to different tech communities from other instances. Now you can switch your view to subscribed to only see all those tech threads.
The problem is when you are subscribed to more than just those tech communities, you can’t filter your view so that you still only have those tech communities on your page.
Multi-subreddits would do just that. You could group different communities together and view them as you view your subscribed list, only now you can have multiple of those lists with different communities in them
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.
Instead of putting everyone who is interesting in technology together, (which is an very large group of people), you can subdivide people.
That already happened with both threads, and subreddits themselves. From that standpoint, the fediverse is just duplicating existing functionality
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
This solves your issue, it isn’t a fundemantal problem, it’s a growing pain.
I love this suggestion.
this issue is about subscribing to all communities of the same name on all federated instances, even ones that might be added in the future.
There’s some problems that would need to be worked through, but ultimately I absolutely crave this being added in.
That and something like multi reddit groupings.
Of course, I would only like this if it were optional. I don’t think it should be core or default.
That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance’s community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.
Differences in an instance’s culture and moderation is one reason I’m not too worried about fragmentation. If anything, I think it’ll be for the better. Even if there’s a lot of overlap in purpose between communities from different instances, the administration, moderation, and lay users of the communities will lend differences to how things feel. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious, sometimes it’s going to be subtle. Either way, I’m in favor of having more options. I think it increases the odds of finding a place that feels just right.
Yes the devs need to work on the multireddit feature that reddit themselves abandoned.
I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?
You could even say it’s neither. Different communities can have different vibes and choice can be good (I’m sure at one point we will be able to define our own multi-communities as well). And Reddit has a similar setup where multiple subs for one topic can be created, so I don’t see it as really that different. It’ll probably coalesce together over time.
