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Federation is pretty cool (lemmy.ubergeek77.chat)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn't federating new posts.

But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.

I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I'll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!

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[โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

Yes, but the problem is that your analogy isn't a 1-2-1 comparison. You are correct that at reddit we had r/tech, r/technology, r/technews, etc etc etc, but on lemmy, ALL OF THOSE can be named "Technology" with exactly the same spelling. So, when I'm trying to refer someone to a "specific" Technology, I also have to include the server. A conversation may go, "Hey WooChoo, you gotta check out the posts over on Lemmy. They have the best Technology content on the internet" Then you go to some rando "Technology" on a new lemmy server and you don't see any posts. What are the chances that you come back to me and say, "Hey Debo, remember that referral you gave me 6 weeks ago when we were talking? I went there and there wasn't any users." "Oh, sorry WooChoo, I forgot that you have to go to "THIS SPECIFIC SERVER of Technology" and then you're in a federation conversation when you were just trying to share a hot tip.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    But on Lemmy you can also give your comm a name (and change it later), so you can have /c/technology on multiple instances and each may have a different name indicating its purpose.

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  • [โ€“] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yes, and this is part of the problem. The great thing about an aggregation site is that it's a collective place for ALL posts about a single topic, say /r/Technology. With Lemmy, you might have DOZENS of /c/technology communities and for you to get the VALUE of the MASS of users, you'd need to subscribe to them all. This is a significant barrier to mass adoption as "my wife" won't be bothered to go out to many servers and subscribe to many communities just to get a reasonable flow of content.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 3 years ago

    I don't think it will be as much of a big deal as people think. Before the major aggregate sites, there's been web forums. Nobody had a problem with it, even novices users.

    Second, it's not like it wasn't happening on Reddit anyway. For example there was r/askscience and r/sciencediscussion. Splinter subreddits were very common, and you might want to sub to 3 or 4 to keep up just with one topic.

    It may actually be a good thing, because similar looking places may have a different feel/scope.

    I mean, on Lemmy you can also specify a display name, i.e. a short description right on the home screen.

    Finally, it tends sort itself on its own. I've already seen one example where 4 communities with the same name popped op, and after one ran away with popularity, another one shut down and the last two just link to the now "main" one. I suspect it will often be the case that just one or a small handful will grow to be major, and the rest will wither off.

    Let's wait a bit, these are just the super early days remember.

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  • [โ€“] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I think you're totally right! That's partially why I said it's a bigger problem on Lemmy. Tools like browse.feddit.de will be pretty important; it'd be great if they were placed prominently somewhere.

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