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!)
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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”.
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
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.
If the choice is tolerating trolls and jerks vs. dealing with communities that are fragmented and harder to find, I’ll choose fragmentation every time.
I just wanna say what’s on my mind (trite though it may be) without all the pedantry, trolling, and hostility. I’m not a mean person IRL, I don’t put up with jerks IRL, and I want the same thing online. Everything else is a distant second. I like Beehaw.
By the same token, I support anyone who disagrees, and I encourage them to find an instance that’s a better match. I just want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable expressing themselves. I hope people find an instance that suits them; they shouldn’t feel like they need to change to suit the instance.
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.
Exactly. Federation was supposed to promote liberal progress but just ended up being highly moderated policing 🤷♂️
Ah yes, /r/technology, the only technology subreddit on reddit. There certainly has never existed a https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/, or / https://www.reddit.com/r/technewstoday/ or a bunch of more technology subreddits. No. Of course there ever only was /r/technology. No fragmentation whatsoever on reddit.
Another example, a random game, Overwatch:
-Overwatch
-overwatch2
-OverwatchTMZ
-OverwatchLFT
-OverwatchPS4
-OverwatchLore
-OverwatchLeague
-CompetitiveOverwatch
-Overwatch_Memes
-OverwatchUniversity
-OWconsoles
-OverwatchCollector
Fragmentation has it’s benefits in this kind of format too, maybe you’re just interested in an aspect of something, not 15 memes a day or drama. You can easily fit everything into one sub, who would want that though.
But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That’s not fragmentation.
You can easily subscribe to all the technology communities here as well, it’s just two clicks sometimes instead of one.
thats fine as long as there aren’t the same posts in all of them!
Then you don’t need all
Thats what a lot of people don’t understand. There were always duplicates
