Technology

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…

On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.

The thing you getting wrong is if you go to /r/technology you are only seeing one subreddit on Reddit. It is not all Technology forums on the internet nor is it even all the Tech stuff on Reddit. You never see it all. The world is big, you never will. You just though you were because Reddit is well known, and the Technology sub-reddit is well known to you. You made a choice just to use that subreddit still and Reddit has no interest in federating with other sites. At least on the Fediverse you can see most things on the Fediverse if you choose.

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".

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".

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.

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.

If the choice is tolerating trolls and jerks vs. dealing with communities that are fragmented and harder to find, I’ll choose fragmentation every time.

I just wanna say what’s on my mind (trite though it may be) without all the pedantry, trolling, and hostility. I’m not a mean person IRL, I don’t put up with jerks IRL, and I want the same thing online. Everything else is a distant second. I like Beehaw.

By the same token, I support anyone who disagrees, and I encourage them to find an instance that’s a better match. I just want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable expressing themselves. I hope people find an instance that suits them; they shouldn’t feel like they need to change to suit the instance.

I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?

Re: fragmentation

Also, this negative “fragmentation” view is biased. Before the subreddit migration, there were already existing and well-established communities in the fediverse. Suddenly, after the subreddit migration, it's being called “fragmentation”.

For example, topics like Star Trek and Books. There are already large communities in the Fediverse before the related subreddits migrated. Yet, you will see people calling it “fragmented”, some even have the guts to call other communities to “merge” with the migrators.

This is wrong and very rude.

Having multiple communities is good. There is no one-size-fits-all. Also, we've been doing that in the entire history of the human race. That said, even if everyone merged into one mega church, it will still split up like it or not.

In other words, we need to stop viewing “fragmentation” as negative. In fact, don't use that word. Don't even think about it. Just setup your community and build it up. Create your own culture. Your own rules. System, team, and invite people who wants to join your type of community.

Multiple communities is healthy for everyone. It is a win for everyone.

And… haven't we learned what happens when we rely on one service? One central platform?

A lot can happen.

1. It suddenly goes offline. We've already experienced this in 2023. A lot of large communities disappeared for almost a week because the instance encountered issues.

2. The instance owner might no longer have the resources to continue. Not necessarily on the financial side, remember, there is the technical side which will take an owner's time.

Sure, they can get other admins to join. But, as an instance admin, would you easily trust access? Consider also the trust your users has given you in protecting their data and privacy.

There were instances who went offline because of that, and instead of transfering management to a new team, or selling their platform to someone, they chose to shut it down permanently because they value the data and privacy of their users.

So… if that instance that happens to be hosting a one-size-fits-all community goes offline…

Well…

1. Or, it can very well be something uncontrollable. Server farm fire, raid, who knows.

But if we let people build their own communities spread across different instances, then we are building redundancy, continuation, and resiliency. If one goes down, for whatever reason, we have existing communities we can move into and continue our discussions, with minimal interference.

^_^

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 think you got things the right way, however keep in mind that there isn't any standard yet. There is indeed multiple communities for the same subjects on Reddit, you just have a principal one. Since things are pretty new on here you haven't major subs emerging. It will eventually be the case I think !

I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.

On Reddit, you also have r/memes and r/meme (and many other similar ones). I think there are r/woo(oooo)sh subs with between 2-6 os. But in both cases one has vastly more users than the other(s), and most people probably only know about the most popular one.

So yea, over time one of these tech communities on Lemmy will probably be much bigger than the others, and grow faster because it's the biggest and thus most attractive.

That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance's community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.

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?

Yes basically. Eventually people will be able to go to the search bar, type "technology" and just click the top result which will be by far the most active. Same thing happened on Reddit, see /r/tech vs /r/technology

And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?

Not really, the fact that all of the de facto communities for topics will be distributed across several instances is already superior to reddit.

Disagree. Look at the number of true or actual subreddits. Fragmentation allows for communities on the same topic to approach things differently. Like one can be a meme community and the other be a serious discussion.

Having more options is always a good thing and is frankly needed so we don't setup another reddit situation where everything is one spot and if the people who control it change views we struggle to move.

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.

I'm actually excited by the idea of smaller communities. After a certain threshold a popular sub becomes more difficult to interact with for me, and I've been finding refuge in smaller subs for quite a while now.

So far just about everything here has that feel to it

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.

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?

To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.

If you want one platform, that's what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?

This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the "pain points" are made more clear.

One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.

This is actually what reddit was like in the early days. It took some time for the major subs to become dominant.

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.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

This solves your issue, it isn't a fundamental problem, it's a growing pain.

People lament fragmentation because they feel like they're missing out on large fractions of posts on a given topic by not being in all of the various communities dedicated to that topic.

But they don't lament not seeing 99.999% of comments on a big subreddit because there are an unmanageable number of them. Or missing out on 99.99% of posts because most never get up voted.

You only need a few hundred active people in a space to make it dynamic and busy. That number also makes it possible to have actually discussions about things with other people.

Really, it's better for everyone involved to find the community on a topic that fits your own vibe, than to throw everyone together into one homogeneous cacophony.

Where your account is hosted and which communities you subscribe to doesn't have to overlap at all. For instance, I'm on VLemmy but almost all of my subbed communities are on Beehaw.

I also think it may be a feature rather than a bug to have multiple communities for each topic. Each individual community can build its own sense of identity, guidelines, and norms. I'm personally feeling refreshed by the smaller volume of posts and comments in a way that encourages me to engage. Reddit had become very passive for me due to the sheer size of everything.

I think some of the difficulty right now is on the presentation side. It may not be as noticable of an issue if we had a way to aggregate and view posts from related communities in a single consolidated view. I'm hoping the tooling around this will improve over time.

And you wont even see most of it if Beehaw keeps defederating

When I search for a community I just go to the one that is most active.

Same thing when looking for a community on Reddit, like others have said, there can be overlap. So, I just go to the one with the most subscribed.

I think if you look at c/technology there is probably one that has a significant amount of users compared to the rest.

We've had Usenet, Forum, IIM, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, etc. etc. They've all kind of started out fragmented but over time people naturally built up their communities and figured out what worked.

Kbin and Lemmy aren't that much different from Usenet or Forums, its just the terminology that is messing people up.

On Usenet communities ended up getting split up because people just really liked to spin off sub groups so you start with comp.technology, then comp.technology.linux, comp.technology.linux.ubuntu etc etc etc.

Forums were always fragmented communities. I have ForumA with these threads and ForumB with these threads, ForumB will never see the posts from ForumA unless they go to that website to see them (and vice versa).

In the Fediverse, sure communities might end up fragmented because each instance has a @technology BUT the benefit is I am on InstanceA and you are on InstanceB and as long as we are federated you can see all of the content from my instance and i can see all the content from yours.

Now, that all being said... One feature I am pushing for to get added to kbin is something along the lines of a multi-subreddit. That way you can set up @technology_@_lemmy.world @technology_@_beehaw.org @technology_@_kbin.social etc to be in this multi-subreddit so as a user you will only see posts from @technology Users don't want to mess with 50 different tech communities but if we had a multi-subreddit feature that blends them all together so it only appeared as @technology I think it would win a lot more people over.

I spun up my own kbin instance so I can hopefully start helping with the development of features (and to lessen the load for other instances). The two features I'm hankering for at the moment are API support so I can write some content aggregator bots and the multi-subbredit feature.

Anyways that is my rant? tedtalk™? Idk, hopefully all of that made sense to someone out there.

the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.

so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.

Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.

I'm rather hoping third-party apps like Jerboa will be able to allow multiple logins at once and have the ability to merge the feeds into one presentation.

I've grabbed the same login name on multiple lemmy servers plus kbin, so my identity is really easy to keep track of at least.

Defederation was always going to be at risk when you have different user bases with different values interacting with each other.

Look at email. The standard is open, but servers won't process email from different domains because those domains are known to be spam only. I expect Lemmy is going to be similar.

This adds up to a huge fragmentation across what was previously a single community.

Unfortunately you're right, fragmentation is inevitable when a community loses it's home. It's only been a few days since the blackout protest started, give it some time for the dust to settle. I expect only one or two of the new communities to really stay active for a prolonged time.