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!)
I don’t think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn’t dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.
On Reddit you also have multiple subreddits on technology. Especially when Reddit was just starting out several people started technology subreddits. It is just that you only visited the one most popular with the most users and most content. Which built up over quite some time. I think it is weird to expect Lemmy instances to be exactly like Reddit is now, when you consider Reddit is 17(!) years old.
While there will be a few instances which are very niche because they get defederated from anyone else and they may have a technology community as well, for the bigger, federated instances there will be the one big technology community again.
Currently people all over the fediverse start new communities without checking if they already exist. This won’t go on indefinitely…
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
Honestly, this is like “the old days” where there were lots of small forums across the web. The big difference now is that you can be a member on one of them and subscribe to others hosted elsewhere, and there are sites like lemmyverse.net to find them. We used to have to find forums ourselves, through word of mouth, search engines, etc.
There’s still forums today, but not as many any more. IMO Lemmy/kbin are a great replacement for ‘traditional’ forum systems. Lemmy even has a theme that looks just like phpBB.
No, this is worse than the old days. Back in the old days, forums were centered around specific groups and interests. All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.
Instead of going back to the old days, what we got is a bunch of general discussion Internet forums.
No, there were and are huge forums which catered to pretty much everything. From chatting to dating, gardening, gaming, technology, motor trucks, all in one forum.
Reddit actually just tried to replicate these forums but with a less centralised approach, ironically, by allowing everyone and not just the forum admins to make a new category on the forum.
I think the problem is more that some people still struggle to understand how to find and subscribe to communities and magazines not on their instance.
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. There needs to be easier ways to move between instances and communities, find communities and group them based on categories so it LOOKs and is parsable from a single pane of glass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One feature suggestion for Lemmy someone made: Create something like a multi-subreddit with Lemmy groups .
I love the idea. Basically, you could toss all the fragemented tech topics into a single multi-subreddit, giving you the ability to browse through a single topic but spanning different Lemmy installations.
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn’t be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that’s manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it’ll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
I don’t think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.
Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community’s values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.
It may actually help if you view an instance as the community, with its “communities” as its topics.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Exactly. Federation was supposed to promote liberal progress but just ended up being highly moderated policing 🤷♂️
I don’t think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn’t dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.
On Reddit you also have multiple subreddits on technology. Especially when Reddit was just starting out several people started technology subreddits. It is just that you only visited the one most popular with the most users and most content. Which built up over quite some time. I think it is weird to expect Lemmy instances to be exactly like Reddit is now, when you consider Reddit is 17(!) years old.
While there will be a few instances which are very niche because they get defederated from anyone else and they may have a technology community as well, for the bigger, federated instances there will be the one big technology community again.
Currently people all over the fediverse start new communities without checking if they already exist. This won’t go on indefinitely…
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.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
Honestly, this is like “the old days” where there were lots of small forums across the web. The big difference now is that you can be a member on one of them and subscribe to others hosted elsewhere, and there are sites like lemmyverse.net to find them. We used to have to find forums ourselves, through word of mouth, search engines, etc.
There’s still forums today, but not as many any more. IMO Lemmy/kbin are a great replacement for ‘traditional’ forum systems. Lemmy even has a theme that looks just like phpBB.
No, this is worse than the old days. Back in the old days, forums were centered around specific groups and interests. All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.
Instead of going back to the old days, what we got is a bunch of general discussion Internet forums.
No, there were and are huge forums which catered to pretty much everything. From chatting to dating, gardening, gaming, technology, motor trucks, all in one forum.
Reddit actually just tried to replicate these forums but with a less centralised approach, ironically, by allowing everyone and not just the forum admins to make a new category on the forum.
I think the problem is more that some people still struggle to understand how to find and subscribe to communities and magazines not on their instance.
What lemmy needs is a multi-Reddit style function where you can group communities into silos by your choosing
Here’s some threads I’m monitoring hoping it’s added.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1156
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. There needs to be easier ways to move between instances and communities, find communities and group them based on categories so it LOOKs and is parsable from a single pane of glass.
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.
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.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:
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:
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.
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.
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.
One feature suggestion for Lemmy someone made: Create something like a multi-subreddit with Lemmy groups .
I love the idea. Basically, you could toss all the fragemented tech topics into a single multi-subreddit, giving you the ability to browse through a single topic but spanning different Lemmy installations.
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn’t be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that’s manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it’ll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
I don’t think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.
Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community’s values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.
It may actually help if you view an instance as the community, with its “communities” as its topics.
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.
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own “meta communities”.
Good to see someone else thought of this feature. This would make the whole experience so much better.
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.
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.
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”.