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!)

  • Lells@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure how Lemmy works, but over on kbin I can set up my magazine (collection of threads similar to a subreddit) to autofederate content based on certain tags. For example, I run the DwarfFortress magazine, and I have it set up to automatically federate content in the fediverse based on the existence of a #dwarffortress tag. Now, I haven’t seen that happen yet, so I’m not 100% if it works or not, but it looks like the option is potentially there.

    • sanjosanjo@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m posting this from kbin, so I don’t know if you will see this, but I thought Magazine was a group set up by kbin (like a sub-reddit, with a specific name). Are you saying that a kbin Magazine is something I set up myself with my own collection of content?

      • Lells@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        No, you had it right the first time. I’m saying if you subscribe to a magazine, there’s a good chance that magazine is autofederating content based on tags, so you are getting more from the magazine than just what is deliberately posted into that magazine.

      • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        When you set up a magazine you have a section at the bottom of the ‘magazine panel’ (basically mod settings) where you can add #tags. Articles in the fediverse with that tag automagically show up in the magazine*

        *terms and conditions apply beta software may not always perfom as expected etc etc

      • Otome-chan@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        it’s not quite “auto federation”. but if you create/moderate a magazine you can set “tags” in the magazine settings that will automatically pull in microblog posts from elsewhere on the fediverse.

    • pixelpusher220@readit.buzz
      0·
      1 year ago

      Hi! wasn’t really a readittor but def used it for the #dwarffortress stuff. How do I find your magazine here? just signed up here at readit.buzz and not seeing it either with the reg search or the magazine search itself.

      • Lells@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        @pixelpusher220 Hmm, I haven’t ran into anybody using readit.buzz yet, but I’m willing to try to help you out! The first thing I would do is make sure that if there is an option for federation to turn it on. Maybe ask within the readit.buzz community how to do this. This is early days for a lot of the tools and instances springing up, so there are still kinks being worked out possibly as well there.

        I know I can reference and link to my sub by referencing it as @DwarfFortress

        @DwarfFortress@kbin.social

        Maybe clicking on that above within readit.buzz will direct you to be able to subscribe?

        In a pinch if you wanted to view the magazine directly, it is at https://kbin.social/m/DwarfFortress

        ETA: The magazine names are usually case sensitive