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!)
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.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Fragmentation is good, as it means there are options for leaving a community behind. Fragmentation and competition are synonyms, and generally competition is good.
Lemmy definitely won’t kill reddit the same way mastodon won’t kill twitter, but I don’t want it to. I just want it them to be successful enough to be a viable alternative when someone like Spez or Elon think they don’t need to listen to their users.
This is how I feel. I’d rather have things be fragmented than be too big to fail. A lot of people have joked in the past few years that it feels like the internet only has 4 sites on it now; I’m pretty happy to be back to browsing multiple. It reminds me of following multiple forums around the same topics back in the day. Variety is the spice of life!
I’m also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I’m hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.
Also being able to point to lemmy and say “go here for a better experience” is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:
- Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
- Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct
By having multiple instances, you aren’t bound by a single ToS or Code of Conduct, you can pick whatever instance you want that matches the content you want to post to a community.
For example, the same “Technology” community could be on:
- an instance directed to kids
- an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
- an instance that discusses weapons technology
Having the community limited to a single instance, would never allow the different discussions each combination of instance:topic would allow, even if the topic is technically the same in all cases.
Forcing communities from multiple instances to merge, would also break the ToS of some of them.
So the logical solution is for the user to decide which instance:communities they want to follow and participate in, respecting the particular ToS and Code of Conduct of each.
On Reddit, the r/Technology community needs to follow a single set of ToS and Code of a Conduct. If you try to discuss something that meets the topic but is not allowed, then you will get banned, possibly from all of Reddit.
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.Overall it feels like the days of massively centralized social media are over. Twitter and Reddit won’t disappear but the fragmentation has already happened. Maybe it will be for the better.
The fragmentation is not inherent to how Lemmy works - the exact same fragmentation can and does happen on Reddit. Just a random example: https://imgur.com/inXBMMA
On Reddit, it usually works out in the end in one way or another. Either mods decide to team up and combine their communities, or the users just naturally pick one community as the “winner”.
things are better on reddit because only a single
communitysubreddit can have one name vs on lemmy where every server can have the same community name - but the end result should be the same in both cases.I think people will eventually get used to the idea that the name of a community is not just the part before the “@”.
I mean, even regular people have no difficulty understanding that e-mail addresses like [email protected] and [email protected] are two different “identifiers” and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think there will be a general understanding that “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are different names.
Give it time. Big communities will form, and unlike Reddit, there will be more competition between them. You won’t just have one group of mods squatting over “Apple” or “Android” because they registered it first.
Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.
the free side, that talks with everyone
the side that talks at everyone and gets mad when people exercise their freedom from listening to everyone
You hold viewpoint A and claim that those that hold viewpoint B do it because they are mad because they don’t get their way instead listening to the actual stated reason, such as OPs.
I think federation is absolutely interesting but this is definitely a consideration and pretending everyone that raises is “umad” or bad is not compelling. Communities online already have problems of “circlejerk” and extreme uniformity. This could easily foster that even more to a point where there’s really no communities of significance. Just similar things to 20-100 people using a chat medium to share stuff.
Honestly, this is like “the old days” where there were lots of small forums across the web. The big difference now is that you can be a member on one of them and subscribe to others hosted elsewhere, and there are sites like lemmyverse.net to find them. We used to have to find forums ourselves, through word of mouth, search engines, etc.
There’s still forums today, but not as many any more. IMO Lemmy/kbin are a great replacement for ‘traditional’ forum systems. Lemmy even has a theme that looks just like phpBB.
No, this is worse than the old days. Back in the old days, forums were centered around specific groups and interests. All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.
Instead of going back to the old days, what we got is a bunch of general discussion Internet forums.
No, there were and are huge forums which catered to pretty much everything. From chatting to dating, gardening, gaming, technology, motor trucks, all in one forum.
Reddit actually just tried to replicate these forums but with a less centralised approach, ironically, by allowing everyone and not just the forum admins to make a new category on the forum.
I think the problem is more that some people still struggle to understand how to find and subscribe to communities and magazines not on their instance.
What lemmy needs is a multi-Reddit style function where you can group communities into silos by your choosing
Here’s some threads I’m monitoring hoping it’s added.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1156
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. There needs to be easier ways to move between instances and communities, find communities and group them based on categories so it LOOKs and is parsable from a single pane of glass.
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On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.
Yep I followed multiple subs with overlapping content, especially with technology, PC hardware, etc etc
There are 2 car-enthusiast subreddits. /r/autos and /r/cars. Years ago they were planning to merge because they were so similar. Some disagreement between the direction caused them to not merge and actually differentiate. Now /r/cars doesn’t allow image posts to foster more discussion while /autos can be more about looking at cool cars. I think similar things will happen to Lemmy
On Reddit you also have multiple subreddits on technology. Especially when Reddit was just starting out several people started technology subreddits. It is just that you only visited the one most popular with the most users and most content. Which built up over quite some time. I think it is weird to expect Lemmy instances to be exactly like Reddit is now, when you consider Reddit is 17(!) years old.
While there will be a few instances which are very niche because they get defederated from anyone else and they may have a technology community as well, for the bigger, federated instances there will be the one big technology community again.
Currently people all over the fediverse start new communities without checking if they already exist. This won’t go on indefinitely…
The thing you getting wrong is if you go to /r/technology you are only seeing one subreddit on Reddit. It is not all Technology forums on the internet nor is it even all the Tech stuff on Reddit. You never see it all. The world is big, you never will. You just though you were because Reddit is well known, and the Technology sub-reddit is well known to you. You made a choice just to use that subreddit still and Reddit has no interest in federating with other sites. At least on the Fediverse you can see most things on the Fediverse if you choose.
This is a good way of describing it. Personally I’m finding that the fediverse is helping me to challenge those old reddit habits of just getting everything from one place. Reddit essentially became THE internet for me and the more I used it, the less I ventured out.
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.
