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!)
the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.
so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.
Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.
Without the possibility of creating a meta layer to let users group different communities into a single feed I just don’t see how that’s a positive. In fact I think without the additional layer people will do what we’ve done in Reddit, congregate into the largest community and the others die out (or find their own niche).
In fact you can see it happen right now. We have almost a dozen Technology communities in different instances, but because beehaw is the biggest people subscribe to that one. This is why Technology@Beehaw.org has more subscribers than all the others combined.
Of course nothing is stopping people from subscribing to all of them, but (from Reddit experience) it ends up getting pretty messy in the general subscribed feed.
well history shows you are probably correct, but i think that’s the problem. i’m old enough to have been through this cycle many times now. it’s just the reality that it costs money to run single large instances of anything, and that money has to come from somewhere. whoever is paying gets to control the direction of the community. historically that has not been the users and that’s where the problem comes in.
i think allowing some kind of grouping functionality for different communities is a fairly simple UX issue really, which still needs to be solved, but shouldn’t be a huge issue. to me the larger problem is discovery really.
This isn’t an intrinsic limitation of the protocol but a matter of UX, and given how frequently it is requested it’s bound to be implemented in some way by some project; if not Lemmy then maybe kbin or something new that crops up.
It’s definitely seems doable, but it’s a feature we don’t have right now and the lack of it negates the benefit of having the same community in multiple instances, because it’s just not usable.
I don’t disagree. I want to see topic aggregation as soon as possible too.