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!)

  • Markoff@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers

    strange, it’s showing me here 1609 subscribers here through kbin, or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?

    • Spzi@lemmy.click
      4·
      2 years ago

      or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?

      I think so, yes (though still learning). From my point of view (lemmy.click, just 83 users):

      I think this shows the number of lemmy.click accounts subscribed to these remote communities.

      But when I open the communities in their home instances, I get a different picture:

    • wilhelm_david@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think it’s kbin users, i’m messing with my own lemmy instance and it only shows local subscribers for anything federated (including this sublemmy)

    • orsetto@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      Idk, but if that’s the case than we have a huge problem lol, because that would mean the users of each instance would tend to prefer that instance’s communities, thus helping fragmentation.

      Edit: just checked from lemmy.ml, and it’s showing 15.5k for its community, and 1.62k for beehaw’s I wonder if having something like a “cross-instance counter” is something the developers have in mind

      • deephurting@beehaw.org
        3·
        2 years ago

        I’m waiting for better control over filtering to be able to see what I want - the duplicate communities are a good example, being able to select all technology instances would be handy. Although will people in each one be posting the same material…perhaps we could have all the comments viewed at once while we’re at it. But that makes you consider what’s the point of having all these instances in the first place.