this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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None of the communities I'm interested are here, and a lot of the posts feel like they're coming from cryptobros. I'm fundamentally interested in the format and tech, but I'm only here because I refuse to use Reddit on mobile, for now. Things could get better or worse, hard to say.
The big problem is Lemmy is designed to work against federation in every way. Communities must be forced into existence because you can't just casually post on your instances /r/knitting and expect anyone to see it.
For every community there has to be a "big community" to become established or else it doesn't exist in a practical sense in Lemmy.
And when it does get established, then the"big one" sucks the air out for all others.
This is a major architectural flaw with Lemmy that was inserted in purpose to concentrate discussion control power in the hands of centralized moderators.
End result, if you want to talk knitting, you'll have to go to https://lemmy.world/c/knitting
What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren't good with tech.
For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we'll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy's advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.
Having multicommunities (either the option to automatically combine all communities with the same name across federated instances into one feed, or some sort of manual linking from the mod side where a community gets combined outward facing while still being hosted across servers with seperate mods) has already been brought up and would be a very good feature to mitigate this issue too. It's not something that has to stay impossible forever.