I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation

jon_010@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 131 points –

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!)

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Without the possibility of creating a meta layer to let users group different communities into a single feed I just don't see how that's a positive. In fact I think without the additional layer people will do what we've done in Reddit, congregate into the largest community and the others die out (or find their own niche).

In fact you can see it happen right now. We have almost a dozen Technology communities in different instances, but because beehaw is the biggest people subscribe to that one. This is why Technology@Beehaw.org has more subscribers than all the others combined.

Of course nothing is stopping people from subscribing to all of them, but (from Reddit experience) it ends up getting pretty messy in the general subscribed feed.

Without the possibility of creating a meta layer to let users group different communities into a single feed

This isn't an intrinsic limitation of the protocol but a matter of UX, and given how frequently it is requested it's bound to be implemented in some way by some project; if not Lemmy then maybe kbin or something new that crops up.

It's definitely seems doable, but it's a feature we don't have right now and the lack of it negates the benefit of having the same community in multiple instances, because it's just not usable.