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!)
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own “meta communities”.
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
While I haven’t spent time looking at kbin, isn’t that essentially what it does with its ‘magazines’? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.
Afaik „magazines“ are just Lemmys „communities“ or reddits „subreddits“
Oh, good to know. For some reason I was under the impression that there was something ‘more’ to a Kbin magazine compared to a subreddit or Lemmy community. I’m sure I read about it somewhere and was sort of surprised at how flexible it seemed – but I can’t seem to find it now, so I may have imagined it!
Oh. I didn’t really realize that. But in looking at a few Magazines I follow, I only see content from my kbin.social instance, not any other instance. It’s also possible that what you’re saying is the intended functionality of kbin, but it might not be working yet since it isn’t a mission critical feature.
This is the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s going to result in a lot of duplicate posts (and the comments will still be fragmented). I’m following several technology communities and a lot of the posts are posted to each of these communities individually. This has always been my concern with federation (along with server health/durability)
It’s not the worst result, but I don’t know how well it will be received by more mainstream users. You also then have to solve discoverability of these “groups/metas”, and THAT has to be hosted on a federated instance so you could still end up with users confused on whether they should follow beehaws tech group or someone else’s….and round and round we go lol
(Just to be clear - I’m not against federation, it’s just such a starkly different model than the normal web that we really have to adjust our mindset and find truly novel solutions or adjust our expectations)
This would be a huge plus, especially if it could be a server-wide multi. Instance maintainers could create /c/technology@instance.com but make it contain content from a curated list of other federated instances with their own /c/technology or lists could be distributed containing popular technology communities and you could import that list as your /c/technology as a personal multi.
I was thinking of something like that too, where if I want to post about a game, I can tag my post in ‘gaming’ as such so others can search for it.
I would really like a /g/ option, where the instance admin can create multis for multiple !gaming instances under a single /g/gaming
This could help curate and avoid just any fedi !community tacking on for nefarious purposes, while allowing users to find all the good !communities under a single multi.