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!)

  • 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.

  • arcdrag@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    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.

    • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      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.

  • Eddie@l.lucitt.comEnglish
    1·
    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.

  • 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”.

  • 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.

  • red@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    On Reddit, you also have r/memes and r/meme (and many other similar ones). I think there are r/woo(oooo)sh subs with between 2-6 os. But in both cases one has vastly more users than the other(s), and most people probably only know about the most popular one.

    So yea, over time one of these tech communities on Lemmy will probably be much bigger than the others, and grow faster because it’s the biggest and thus most attractive.

    • Bowen@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Don’t forget the 4 AITA subs, a few subs for some fandoms because admins can be trash (Making a Murderer has like 3 itself). It’s fragmented on reddit too.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.

    • EvilColeslaw@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yep I followed multiple subs with overlapping content, especially with technology, PC hardware, etc etc

      • JillyB@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

  • 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.

  • miles@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m actually excited by the idea of smaller communities. After a certain threshold a popular sub becomes more difficult to interact with for me, and I’ve been finding refuge in smaller subs for quite a while now.

    So far just about everything here has that feel to it

    • Enfield [he/him]@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      When I first starting shifting away from Reddit, I was nervous about whether I’d like having smaller communities. I’m definitely adapting more to it myself.

      I remember coming to a similar realization with Discord servers. I started out with joining servers between friends and I figured that maybe I was missing out by not getting into some larger ones. I actively tried getting into a couple of servers that weren’t even all that big compared to some numbers I’ve heard before—the servers I’d try to get into were like, 3,000+ users typically?

      The conversations always felt way too fast for me to get a word in, and it never felt like I had many chances to start conversations unless it was like 2am and most of the serve was asleep. Voice chat feels like I can’t even get my foot in the door. Server rules and policies paradoxically felt convoluted as well as nebulous. I make a solid attempt at integrating into the culture wherever I go, but I could never seem to do those servers right. I still stick around some of those servers now, but only because they play meaningful roles in communities I’m in.

      -

      It feels radical to say, because I’m so used to equating Big Numbers and Lots of Content to being a healthy community, but maybe there really isn’t too much wrong with a smaller or slower community? That’s not to knock anyone who’d prefer the contrary, but I’m starting to realize that me personally, it’s those smaller places that I really enjoy, and that maybe I don’t give them enough credit. It takes more time for fresh content and talk to come in, but when it does, it feels meaningful and like I actually have a chance to be that someone who starts it in the first place. The moderation and culture feels much more in touch with the community there.

      I hope Beehaw succeeds in whatever the community and its leadership wants it to be, but I hope that it holds on to its integrity and the philosophy it’s communicated so far, even if that means it leans toward a smaller feel. I think I kinda like that feel to it.

  • bdiddy@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s an early day sorta problem you are looking at. From the reddit point of view. r/technology just sorta became the default, but there are other tech news subs for sure.

    Early reddit there were probably 100s of them and then everyone just found /r/technology and that’s where you can get the most engagement.

    I do think lemmy will need a way to create your own multi-community subs. So you can quickly click on your “tech” tree and see all the tech subs you’ve subscribed to.

    behaw defederating though could cause issues, but I’d think over time that’ll sort itself out as well.

    End of the day people will settle into communities and eventually there will probably be a main tech place and that’ll just be where you go. Just going to take some time for people to sort through it.

    There are a lot of people on reddit that just post for karma or w/e reasons so we definitely have less content because we have less bots. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not… I’d also imagin eventually we’ll have plenty of bots.