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!)
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- 0 users online
- 13 users / day
- 237 users / week
- 638 users / month
- 1.28K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 1.67K Posts
- 28.1K Comments
- Modlog
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.
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.
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.
I agree. Even though I always knew there was more then Reddit, Reddit kind of becomes the place. For me included, even though I have used Forums of all sorts for over 40 years. So thinking Reddit is the only place is what they want you to think and it is easy to start thinking that way. Frankly it takes some un-thinking to actually come to one’s senses.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:
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:
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.
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.
This is definitely a great post. The only thing that I think would help also would be discoverability and user choice, but it’s obviously easy to say without working on it.
Reddit had relatively consistent discoverability, but the whole “federation” aspect (which is the whole point) makes a very different landscape to wade through.
Definitely, this is a milestone for a new wave of “early adopters”. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.
If you want one platform, that’s what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?
This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the “pain points” are made more clear.
One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.
Maybe platforms collapsing is a feature and not a defect. I moved from Digg to Reddit and felt no great loss that Digg no longer exists years later.
That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance’s community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.
Yes the devs need to work on the multireddit feature that reddit themselves abandoned.
Differences in an instance’s culture and moderation is one reason I’m not too worried about fragmentation. If anything, I think it’ll be for the better. Even if there’s a lot of overlap in purpose between communities from different instances, the administration, moderation, and lay users of the communities will lend differences to how things feel. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious, sometimes it’s going to be subtle. Either way, I’m in favor of having more options. I think it increases the odds of finding a place that feels just right.
I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.
Seriously, how many times have you heard Redditors complain that a community has gotten too toxic, or too meme-filled, or too obnoxious, or too (insert whatever adjective).
Guess what - on Lemmy, you and all the people that think that can start a new one, and you can moderate that stuff out. And the people that enjoy the existing community and its vibe can remain. And you can all like the same stuff while treating it differently. I’m all for the migration, but man I am getting burnt out on all the fresh rexxitors posting about how they don’t get or want to change lemmy after they’ve been here for like three days.
I’m rather hoping third-party apps like Jerboa will be able to allow multiple logins at once and have the ability to merge the feeds into one presentation.
I’ve grabbed the same login name on multiple lemmy servers plus kbin, so my identity is really easy to keep track of at least.
How can I find the biggest ones to follow suit? I thought we could carry usernames across servers. I guess I’m not following all this federated stuff very well after all.
This site has the servers listed: https://lemmyverse.net/
and from one login, you can subscribe to communities hosted on different servers, but communications seem to be rather laggy when you do that.
This is actually what reddit was like in the early days. It took some time for the major subs to become dominant.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
This solves your issue, it isn’t a fundemantal problem, it’s a growing pain.
I love this suggestion.
There’s some problems that would need to be worked through, but ultimately I absolutely crave this being added in.
That and something like multi reddit groupings.
Of course, I would only like this if it were optional. I don’t think it should be core or default.
One feature suggestion for Lemmy someone made: Create something like a multi-subreddit with Lemmy groups .
I love the idea. Basically, you could toss all the fragemented tech topics into a single multi-subreddit, giving you the ability to browse through a single topic but spanning different Lemmy installations.
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
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.
People lament fragmentation because they feel like they’re missing out on large fractions of posts on a given topic by not being in all of the various communities dedicated to that topic.
But they don’t lament not seeing 99.999% of comments on a big subreddit because there are an unmanageable number of them. Or missing out on 99.99% of posts because most never get up voted.
You only need a few hundred active people in a space to make it dynamic and busy. That number also makes it possible to have actually discussions about things with other people.
Really, it’s better for everyone involved to find the community on a topic that fits your own vibe, than to throw everyone together into one homogeneous cacophony.
When I search for a community I just go to the one that is most active.
Same thing when looking for a community on Reddit, like others have said, there can be overlap. So, I just go to the one with the most subscribed.
I think if you look at c/technology there is probably one that has a significant amount of users compared to the rest.
When I grew up I could call local telephones without the area code. Now I can’t. I managed.