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!)
What you need to understand is that “lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit” is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other “reddits”.
The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren’t “the same one community split fragmented” they’re separate communities.
so while I can post in here on [email protected] it’s very much the case and obvious to me that it’s separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our [email protected] which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.
In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren’t the same thing.
I know y’all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don’t exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I’m in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn’t help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.
tl;dr: they’re different communities, not the same community split among instances.
edit: it’s also worth noting that us kbinauts aren’t even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.
Can I reply to beehaw posts from kbin?
Edit: It worked!
I’m enjoying just working it all out too. Best thing to come from Reddit in a while.
I’m hoping (actually, expecting-- if we’re being honest) that features are added to reddit-esque apps like lemmy and kbin that allow you to make personal groups of magazines/communities. This would very nearly solve the fragmentation “problem”. Better yet if they add a way to share these personal groups to be imported by others.
Then we would get the benefits that come with decentralization, but without the detriments that come along with it.
I love that “kbinauts” is gaining traction
I wish kbin made it more obvious what instance a given thread in your feed is from. If it’s from lemmy, I know I can post memes and I should be prepared for flame wars. If it’s from beehaw, I know I can have a thoughtful and respectful conversation. I’m okay with either, but I don’t want to accidentally write an essay on lemmy that no one will read, or pick a fight on beehaw with someone who had no ill intent.
If it’s from kbin I know we’ll spend some time talking about how great everything is and how we’re all just stoked to be here 😁
I feel like it’s just me posting kbinauts everywhere lol. also I love your assessment on the different communities :)
A native support for distinguishable instance indicator will be awesome, in the meantime, you can use this userscript https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468612-kbin-enhancement-script
Very well put. I’d like to add, that it’s actually a good thing that the fediverse is “fragmented” because then the power vacuum that happened on reddit can’t easily happen here.
That’s an upside, but it’s not necessarily a “good” thing to be fragmented if it means you don’t have the network effects to make a satisfying community.
End of the day a lot of Reddit’s value came from its popularity.
Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.
I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.
But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.
There’s a sweet spot. A dead forum is of no use to anyone. Reddit had a good few years where there were enough users to have a good exchange of information, and not a sea of low effort posts. I think it all changed when they started advertising their app and “new reddit” on Facebook.
Well, define “dead”, because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.
People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.
Huh? No, I’d say the opposite, the fediverse is in the sweet spot right now.
Ugh, yes, it’s unfortunate that popularity ruined so many subs. We’ve all watched a tonne of them turn into generic repost mills over the years.
Hard disagree.
Tiktok is popular. Its hold very little value to lots of people though. Same thing with twitter.
For me, reddits value was from its popularity amongst a certain demographic, which was largely the techies. At this point enough techies have come over to the fediverse that so far its meeting or exceeding the reddit itch.
Id rather a community of 10,000 people who are mostly tech driven than a community of 10,000,000 with 10,000 techy types. Popular reddit posts had thousands of the same played out comments and comment chains languishing at the bottom of threads. Popular threads on the fediverse so far have people engaging in conversation without a collapsed thread of 4000 ignored posts at the bottom.
Popularity means nothing when its mostly people with nothing worthwhile to say except the same played out jokes and memes
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Recently, I was subbed to overlapping sources on kbin and Lemmy and I realized I had to cut the fat. I see similar posts covering the same event in multiple places, but I’m not going to seriously engage in all of them.
Basically, I don’t need to find the biggest one that has everything on it or create one mega aggregate, I just need to find the right place for me. Some people seem to want to be plugged into this 1 big nexus of every permutation of a topic, but I don’t see a reason for it.
If you extend that thinking out to the internet as a whole, you’d need to be part of these forums and this subreddit and this Facebook group and these discords or you’re gonna miss out on something. But most of it is just noise at a certain point.
Exactly. We do it in real life so why not online too. Variety is the spice of life!