this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Technology

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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!)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

This premise, I feel is the wrong way to look at it. What you think what's makes Reddit great and what made reddit great to me are totally different. What each user wants or expects from a reddit alternative is something that ISN'T Reddit. If I wanted Reddit, I'd go back to Reddit.

From your post, I don't think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.

I think the "fragmentation" of the current fediverse is great, its no longer one massive hivemind of a single dominate discussion points. I think in the long term, many of these communities will grow and change to suit their respective audience and some will fall out of favor and that's okay.

I personally do NOT want a single technology community. It becomes boring and samey really fast as the same opinions are reiterated over and over. Focused unique communities will come around that will be my peak of this amazing system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

plus it felt like a lot of stuff got curated and posted by super users around the big subreddits. it felt like there were like the same 20 peoples posts getting most of the attention. at least here theres the potential for more diverse view points and posts from different instances.

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