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!)
Yes basically. Eventually people will be able to go to the search bar, type “technology” and just click the top result which will be by far the most active. Same thing happened on Reddit, see /r/tech vs /r/technology
Not really, the fact that all of the de facto communities for topics will be distributed across several instances is already superior to reddit.
The problem is that federation doesn’t work very well just yet. I see different subscriber stats based on which instance I view from. It’s very confusing for a new user.
It doesn’t help that there are people trying to cybersquat on communities. I see a lot of mods create 20 new communities with no content. That’s not helping anyone.
Well that wouldn’t be true for someone that is on an instance that is defederated from the most active one, and even if that’s not the case, I would only see posts in there from people that are not part of instances that are defederated by my instance. So depending on which instance I am, I’ll see more or less posts on these comunities.
That’s the major problem I see right now and for which I don’t see any other solution than everyone creating their own instance for themselfes to be able to see everything.
We’re in flux right now. Give it time, instances will stabilize, options beside “block the entire instance” will become available to admins, any instance that tries defederating popular instances will probably just die.