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!)

  • jarfil@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • emmaviolets@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Eddie@l.lucitt.comEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Contend6248@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • nd_nb@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That’s not fragmentation.

      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        You can easily subscribe to all the technology communities here as well, it’s just two clicks sometimes instead of one.

  • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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”.

    • lovesickoyster@lemmy.oneEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      things are better on reddit because only a single community subreddit 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.

      • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Nonameuser678@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • gabo2007@vlemmy.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • lmaydev@vlemmy.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • cykablyatbot@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • arcdrag@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • karce@wizanons.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.