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!)
Overall it feels like the days of massively centralized social media are over. Twitter and Reddit won’t disappear but the fragmentation has already happened. Maybe it will be for the better.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Fragmentation is good, as it means there are options for leaving a community behind. Fragmentation and competition are synonyms, and generally competition is good.
Lemmy definitely won’t kill reddit the same way mastodon won’t kill twitter, but I don’t want it to. I just want it them to be successful enough to be a viable alternative when someone like Spez or Elon think they don’t need to listen to their users.
I’m also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I’m hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.
Also being able to point to lemmy and say “go here for a better experience” is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.
This is how I feel. I’d rather have things be fragmented than be too big to fail. A lot of people have joked in the past few years that it feels like the internet only has 4 sites on it now; I’m pretty happy to be back to browsing multiple. It reminds me of following multiple forums around the same topics back in the day. Variety is the spice of life!
I agree with what others are saying, it’s not different than people starting their own subreddits when they don’t like the main community anymore. But I also agree with you, a little bit of competition is good. It may be a little unconstructive at first while the user count is still small but eventually supporting a few communities on the same topic instead of just one will have it’s benefits.
I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn’t matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I’ll just get them all in my feed. I’m following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn’t care less where it comes from, as long as I’m following I’m good to go.
There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.
deleted by creator
Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.
I think this take makes the most sense. It seems like the totally free and open lemmy instances will do their best to re-create the Reddit that they came from. Other communities will aim for something more tight-knit (not unlike Discord servers). Both can co-exist, but it is hard to imagine the tight-knit ones taking much advantage of the federation features.
the free side, that talks with everyone
the side that talks at everyone and gets mad when people exercise their freedom from listening to everyone
You hold viewpoint A and claim that those that hold viewpoint B do it because they are mad because they don’t get their way instead listening to the actual stated reason, such as OPs.
I think federation is absolutely interesting but this is definitely a consideration and pretending everyone that raises is “umad” or bad is not compelling. Communities online already have problems of “circlejerk” and extreme uniformity. This could easily foster that even more to a point where there’s really no communities of significance. Just similar things to 20-100 people using a chat medium to share stuff.
My comment was in response to the implication that people who exercise their right to not listen to everyone talking are using defederation as some sort of weapon to fulfil their chaotic, destructive agenda while free-speech instances are merely open to any and all interactions like exemplary participants in a civilised democratic society.
If you actually want to know what my perspective is, I just wrote about it: https://mander.xyz/post/739439
Just read your post and I get its points. I don’t see how combating one misrepresentation with a misrepresentation of your own improves the situation but at least I get what you’re aiming to respond to now.
Even if you don’t think it as ideological, there’s some functionality/existencial aspects that make a discussion interesting. Instability and arbitrariness, if there’s a lot of change without consistency and transparency, can lead to only people who value the authority’s opinion.
In a way I’m trying to decide if in practice instance federation works like “this is my ball, and we’ll do what I say when I say, and you accepted that because it’s federation” or if there’s a more open promise for stability. How much deep the fragmentation will go because of disagreements and how much friction does that cause on the end users when this happens (this is something you talk about when you mention the Identities across instances)
Maybe it’s less prone to change and can provide more stability but an event like reddits current situation definitely brought about some chaos.
The mod post about talking with the other instance admins seems like it’s not about animosity but amicably spoken ideological differences but that goes back to my point.
When something is so exclusive maybe it’ll have to invest extra to not be misunderstood when it’s shared often with a different pitch, using more centralized patterns that are known to “mainstream” social network/forum users.
I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?
You could even say it’s neither. Different communities can have different vibes and choice can be good (I’m sure at one point we will be able to define our own multi-communities as well). And Reddit has a similar setup where multiple subs for one topic can be created, so I don’t see it as really that different. It’ll probably coalesce together over time.
Ah yes, /r/technology, the only technology subreddit on reddit. There certainly has never existed a https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/, or / https://www.reddit.com/r/technewstoday/ or a bunch of more technology subreddits. No. Of course there ever only was /r/technology. No fragmentation whatsoever on reddit.
Lol.
Thats what a lot of people don’t understand. There were always duplicates
Another example, a random game, Overwatch:
-Overwatch
-overwatch2
-OverwatchTMZ
-OverwatchLFT
-OverwatchPS4
-OverwatchLore
-OverwatchLeague
-CompetitiveOverwatch
-Overwatch_Memes
-OverwatchUniversity
-OWconsoles
-OverwatchCollector
Fragmentation has it’s benefits in this kind of format too, maybe you’re just interested in an aspect of something, not 15 memes a day or drama. You can easily fit everything into one sub, who would want that though.
But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That’s not fragmentation.
You can easily subscribe to all the technology communities here as well, it’s just two clicks sometimes instead of one.
thats fine as long as there aren’t the same posts in all of them!
Then you don’t need all
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:
- Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
- Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct
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:
- an instance directed to kids
- an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
- an instance that discusses weapons technology
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.
Removed by mod
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.
That’s the worst, someone gets the name first and they’ve ruled as mods ever since. Subs never rotate mods or rules and it goes unchecked. Here if you don’t like it, start your own
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.
The fragmentation is not inherent to how Lemmy works - the exact same fragmentation can and does happen on Reddit. Just a random example: https://imgur.com/inXBMMA
On Reddit, it usually works out in the end in one way or another. Either mods decide to team up and combine their communities, or the users just naturally pick one community as the “winner”.
things are better on reddit because only a single
communitysubreddit can have one name vs on lemmy where every server can have the same community name - but the end result should be the same in both cases.I think people will eventually get used to the idea that the name of a community is not just the part before the “@”.
I mean, even regular people have no difficulty understanding that e-mail addresses like bob@google.com and bob@microsoft.com are two different “identifiers” and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think there will be a general understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” are different names
Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” are different names
I think this is exactly what OP is trying to point out - they are two different communities, when on reddit there would only be one - therefore the fragmentation.
on reddit there would only be one
The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for “Blue Protocol”, apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.
The phenomenon exists for all systems where there is no central authority deciding names and categories, which is true for both reddit and lemmy. Individual users can decide to create a new group regardless of existing groups, for a variety of reasons. This naturally leads to some duplicates.
The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for “Blue Protocol”, apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.
they were all different names, there could be only one BlueProtocol.
And as sunaurus said, they all have different names on Lemmy too, once you realize you need to count the entire identifier and not just the part before the @.
On reddit you’d have /r/tech and /r/technology, both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. On Lemmy you’ll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they’ll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.
On Lemmy you’ll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names.
on reddit you have r/tech and r/technology, the analogue on lemmy would be /c/tech@instance1, /c/tech@instance2, …, /c/technology@instance1, /c/technology@instance2, … - the chance for fragmentation is much greater.
Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they’ll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.
Agreed. This is exactly what I’ve been saying as well.
And like some other commenters have said: Lemmy is still very new and no standards and a lot of UX features still need to emerge. I am of the opinion that this fragmentation is a symptom of a UX problem and not inherent to anything specific to Lemmy.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances and provide a way for the user to view them by subscriber, popularity or newest, for example. But right now, it relies on the user to initiate a subscription to a community in another server for server discovery.
I could see a list of “popular instances” emerging at some point as a means for instance maintainers to prepopulate this in the future.m and Lemmy to support importing such a list to seed federation on new instances.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances
Thankfully it looks like this sort of thing is already on the radar.
We can just subscribe to both though. I think we can even cross post. At least I’ve seen some things that look like cross posts. Frankly, I don’t see any difference.
I think what they mean is that taking your example with blue protocol, that same thing can happen both within instances and between instances. I do think it will eventually sort itself out but will take longer.
Fragmentation is certainly a problem if you’re looking for Reddit-style cohesive communities, how much of a problem it is remains to be seen in my opinion. The risk with trying to do things the Reddit way is that one or two large instances become dominant and you’ve just got Reddit all over again.
One potential solution that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the concept of “meta communities” - collections of smaller related communities across the fediverse that can be subscribed to and interacted with as if they were one, sort of like multi-Reddits. Users could potentially vote on a smaller community being admitted into the meta community, or there could be some other requirement. It could even be done locally/on a per user basis through a browser extension or their account on their home instance. It’s not perfect but it’s maybe something to explore.
Alternatively we just get used to more compact communities again. Let’s be honest - do we really have to know everything, all of the time?
Right now it might be a problem, but in the long term the communitys work it out themselves, reddit also had 10 different (general) memes subreddits.
As long as the instances are federated you can find their communitys pretty easily and participate there
Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like “best gaming mouse kbin” via Google?
Assuming those posts actually wind up here, yes.
I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.
