I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation
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!)
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…
Nothing to add here. Thank you.
Reddit 16 year club here
Can confirm
I think the difference is entry points. You’d start with /r/gaming - but you may eventually unsubscribe from that and subscribe to more niche gaming subreddits or even game specific subreddits. The day one Reddit experience is significantly more digestible compared to Lemmy. Content and community discovery isn’t as easy on Lemmy either.
It'll get better with time though. The tech needs time to improve and the ecosystem needs time to grow. Contributing to those two things will be what allows issues like difficult onboarding and difficulty discovering content to naturally solve themselves.
On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.
Yep I followed multiple subs with overlapping content, especially with technology, PC hardware, etc etc
There are 2 car-enthusiast subreddits. /r/autos and /r/cars. Years ago they were planning to merge because they were so similar. Some disagreement between the direction caused them to not merge and actually differentiate. Now /r/cars doesn't allow image posts to foster more discussion while /autos can be more about looking at cool cars. I think similar things will happen to Lemmy
I agree that something similar will happen over time. I think there’ll inevitably be overlap between instances and their communities, and that overlap will stymy discussions to a degree. But I also think that instances and their communities will gradually begin to develop their niches and have different strokes for different folks. Beehaw may be more attractive to having a friendlier or more cultivated group and discussion, another instance could lean toward corralling the banter and memes, and another still could be the best fit for media.
I think the most powerful thing about platforms like Lemmy, even if instances aren’t in federation and even if multiple accounts end up needing to be juggled, is that Lemmy makes creating communities and instances like Reddit so much more accessible. Reddit is no longe the only place to get an experience with a format like Reddit, and I think that’s a big win.
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".
things are better on reddit because only a single community can have one name vs on lemmy where every server can have the same community name - but the end result should be the same in both cases.
I think people will eventually get used to the idea that the name of a community is not just the part before the "@".
I mean, even regular people have no difficulty understanding that e-mail addresses like bob@google.com and bob@microsoft.com are two different "identifiers" and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that "!foo@lemmy.ml" and "!foo@beehaw.org" are different names
I think this is exactly what OP is trying to point out - they are two different communities, when on reddit there would only be one - therefore the fragmentation.
And like some other commenters have said: Lemmy is still very new and no standards and a lot of UX features still need to emerge. I am of the opinion that this fragmentation is a symptom of a UX problem and not inherent to anything specific to Lemmy.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances and provide a way for the user to view them by subscriber, popularity or newest, for example. But right now, it relies on the user to initiate a subscription to a community in another server for server discovery.
I could see a list of “popular instances” emerging at some point as a means for instance maintainers to prepopulate this in the future.m and Lemmy to support importing such a list to seed federation on new instances.
Thankfully it looks like this sort of thing is already on the radar.
The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for "Blue Protocol", apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.
The phenomenon exists for all systems where there is no central authority deciding names and categories, which is true for both reddit and lemmy. Individual users can decide to create a new group regardless of existing groups, for a variety of reasons. This naturally leads to some duplicates.
they were all different names, there could be only one BlueProtocol.
And as sunaurus said, they all have different names on Lemmy too, once you realize you need to count the entire identifier and not just the part before the @.
On reddit you'd have /r/tech and /r/technology, both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. On Lemmy you'll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they'll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.
on reddit you have r/tech and r/technology, the analogue on lemmy would be /c/tech@instance1, /c/tech@instance2, ..., /c/technology@instance1, /c/technology@instance2, ... - the chance for fragmentation is much greater.
Agreed. This is exactly what I've been saying as well.
We can just subscribe to both though. I think we can even cross post. At least I've seen some things that look like cross posts. Frankly, I don't see any difference.
I think what they mean is that taking your example with blue protocol, that same thing can happen both within instances and between instances. I do think it will eventually sort itself out but will take longer.
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.
This is a good way of describing it. Personally I'm finding that the fediverse is helping me to challenge those old reddit habits of just getting everything from one place. Reddit essentially became THE internet for me and the more I used it, the less I ventured out.
I agree. Even though I always knew there was more then Reddit, Reddit kind of becomes the place. For me included, even though I have used Forums of all sorts for over 40 years. So thinking Reddit is the only place is what they want you to think and it is easy to start thinking that way. Frankly it takes some un-thinking to actually come to one's senses.
That's turned out to be a big thing for me, too. When I was younger, I'd spend literally hours a day on StumbleUpon some days, just clicking through niche sites I'd never find otherwise, and submitting new ones I found that I thought other people would like. It was a competition to find the most interesting little-known sites! Now I spend 70% of my browsing time on Reddit, just passively seeing what other people have found.
It's time to get back out there!
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.
That's the worst, someone gets the name first and they've ruled as mods ever since. Subs never rotate mods or rules and it goes unchecked. Here if you don't like it, start your own
This is definitely a great post. The only thing that I think would help also would be discoverability and user choice, but it's obviously easy to say without working on it.
Reddit had relatively consistent discoverability, but the whole "federation" aspect (which is the whole point) makes a very different landscape to wade through.
Definitely, this is a milestone for a new wave of "early adopters". It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own "meta communities".
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
While I haven't spent time looking at kbin, isn't that essentially what it does with its 'magazines'? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.
Afaik „magazines“ are just Lemmys „communities“ or reddits „subreddits“
Oh, good to know. For some reason I was under the impression that there was something 'more' to a Kbin magazine compared to a subreddit or Lemmy community. I'm sure I read about it somewhere and was sort of surprised at how flexible it seemed – but I can't seem to find it now, so I may have imagined it!
This is the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s going to result in a lot of duplicate posts (and the comments will still be fragmented). I’m following several technology communities and a lot of the posts are posted to each of these communities individually. This has always been my concern with federation (along with server health/durability)
It’s not the worst result, but I don’t know how well it will be received by more mainstream users. You also then have to solve discoverability of these “groups/metas”, and THAT has to be hosted on a federated instance so you could still end up with users confused on whether they should follow beehaws tech group or someone else’s….and round and round we go lol
(Just to be clear - I’m not against federation, it’s just such a starkly different model than the normal web that we really have to adjust our mindset and find truly novel solutions or adjust our expectations)
This would be a huge plus, especially if it could be a server-wide multi. Instance maintainers could create /c/technology@instance.com but make it contain content from a curated list of other federated instances with their own /c/technology or lists could be distributed containing popular technology communities and you could import that list as your /c/technology as a personal multi.
I was thinking of something like that too, where if I want to post about a game, I can tag my post in 'gaming' as such so others can search for it.
I would really like a /g/ option, where the instance admin can create multis for multiple !gaming instances under a single /g/gaming
This could help curate and avoid just any fedi !community tacking on for nefarious purposes, while allowing users to find all the good !communities under a single multi.
Good to see someone else thought of this feature. This would make the whole experience so much better.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like this:
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:
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.
Thats what a lot of people don’t understand. There were always duplicates
But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That's not fragmentation.
You can easily subscribe to all the technology communities here as well, it’s just two clicks sometimes instead of one.
thats fine as long as there aren't the same posts in all of them!
Then you don't need all
Lol.
Another example, a random game, Overwatch:
-Overwatch
-overwatch2
-OverwatchTMZ
-OverwatchLFT
-OverwatchPS4
-OverwatchLore
-OverwatchLeague
-CompetitiveOverwatch
-Overwatch_Memes
-OverwatchUniversity
-OWconsoles
-OverwatchCollector
Fragmentation has it's benefits in this kind of format too, maybe you're just interested in an aspect of something, not 15 memes a day or drama. You can easily fit everything into one sub, who would want that though.
I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?
You could even say it’s neither. Different communities can have different vibes and choice can be good (I’m sure at one point we will be able to define our own multi-communities as well). And Reddit has a similar setup where multiple subs for one topic can be created, so I don’t see it as really that different. It’ll probably coalesce together over time.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
^_^
Well said, this was all something I didn't really understand before reddit did what it did. It's all crystal clear now though!
Good points and well written! Would give you gold if i could. The word fragmented in this context has positive connotations of resiliency, variety and freedom.
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 agree with what others are saying, it's not different than people starting their own subreddits when they don't like the main community anymore. But I also agree with you, a little bit of competition is good. It may be a little unconstructive at first while the user count is still small but eventually supporting a few communities on the same topic instead of just one will have it's benefits.
This is how I feel. I'd rather have things be fragmented than be too big to fail. A lot of people have joked in the past few years that it feels like the internet only has 4 sites on it now; I'm pretty happy to be back to browsing multiple. It reminds me of following multiple forums around the same topics back in the day. Variety is the spice of life!
I'm also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I'm hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.
Also being able to point to lemmy and say "go here for a better experience" is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.
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.
Seriously, how many times have you heard Redditors complain that a community has gotten too toxic, or too meme-filled, or too obnoxious, or too (insert whatever adjective).
Guess what - on Lemmy, you and all the people that think that can start a new one, and you can moderate that stuff out. And the people that enjoy the existing community and its vibe can remain. And you can all like the same stuff while treating it differently. I'm all for the migration, but man I am getting burnt out on all the fresh rexxitors posting about how they don't get or want to change lemmy after they've been here for like three days.
No i think they do get it, it's exactly like how subreddits work, if you don't like how /r/technology works, you can always create a new tech based subreddit moderated anyway you like. The issue isnt that there are multiple communities.
The problem, as always, is discoverability of all of these disjointed communities. I'm still new to Lemmy, but it seems like you have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them.
That's a tool that exists and can be very helpful, but you can also browse all communities federated with your instance by just going to "Communities" and selecting "all". You can search for anything that way. It's not perfect and in desperate need of some filtering/sorting tools (coming in the future I believe), but you definitely don't have to use a third party tool! Also works on Jerboa, not sure about the iOS app.
This only seems to show communities that people have searched for by URL in the past, or communities that other users on the same server have subscribed to, or something like that. I have a Lemmy instance just for myself, and when I go to Communities then to All, it only shows communities I've subscribed to. I need to search for others by URL to be able to find them.
There's another one at https://lemmyverse.net/communities that I prefer more :)
Change is hard and can be confusing. If the community remains open and helpful hopefully a real push can be made towards taking sites like Reddit down a few pegs.
Exactly; this puts alternatives out there! On Reddit, it takes lots of fed up people to set up a new sub should there be an unpopular new rule or power-tripping mods. If one instance has more ‘troll-adjacent’ users on a gaming community, I can just go somewhere else.
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 !
That's the point! If you look at Reddit and choose an argument, say for example "pc building subreddit", you could find dozens of subreddit related to that topics. There are 1 or 2 that have the majority of good contents and users, but this happens over times.
Exactly: r/baseball and r/MLB, r/hockey and r/NHL, the 50 Linux subreddits, it goes on and on. Fragmentation is far from a fediverse innovation.
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.
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.
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.
Well said, variety is the spice of life! Reddit became very samey over the years. The archive of info is fantastic but who's to say that cant happen on a federated platform? Things are new and rapidly changing right now, I have confidence that Lemmy and platforms like it will grow into their own and become better than the things it's replaced. Reddit was long overdue for some competition or correction, here it is
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.
I was very much into Internet forums as a child and posted on quite a few. But I didn't go on any of the general discussion boards, I focused those on specific topics or niches. That is what's missing with the fediverse today. Everyone is trying to provide a Reddit alternative right now but forget what made Internet forums of old great - their singular focus on a particular topic, community, or subject.
All of the forums I've used didn't focus on a single topic or subject. It was usually made up of people sharing a general interest, but there were always boards within each forum for either general discussion or more focused discussion on a particular topic like movies, games, art, philosophy, etc
That's fair. Everyone has a different way of doing things.
I don't know that they're forgetting it. Both types of forum exist here. There's plenty of general-purpose instances, but there's plenty of specific instances too. At a casual glance, maybe a third of the instances on the join-lemmy list? startrek.website is a Star Trek-focused instance. programming.dev is a programming-focused instance. lennygrad.ml is a marxism-focused instance. There's a wet shaving instance, there's a cyberpunk instance, there's a solarpunk instance, there's a magic: the gathering instance, there's a dungeons and dragons instance, there's a pathfinder instance, there's SEVERAL furry instances, there's a general anime/manga instance and also instances for specific anime or manga, hell there's an instance just for butts.
If you want to join a focused instance and focus on that topic, just like old-style forums, that's already just a thing you can do. You don't have to take advantage of federation.
What lemmy needs is a multi-Reddit style function where you can group communities into silos by your choosing
Here’s some threads I’m monitoring hoping it’s added.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1156
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. There needs to be easier ways to move between instances and communities, find communities and group them based on categories so it LOOKs and is parsable from a single pane of glass.
No, there were and are huge forums which catered to pretty much everything. From chatting to dating, gardening, gaming, technology, motor trucks, all in one forum.
Reddit actually just tried to replicate these forums but with a less centralised approach, ironically, by allowing everyone and not just the forum admins to make a new category on the forum.
I think the problem is more that some people still struggle to understand how to find and subscribe to communities and magazines not on their instance.
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.
Don't forget the 4 AITA subs, a few subs for some fandoms because admins can be trash (Making a Murderer has like 3 itself). It's fragmented on reddit too.
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.
Maybe platforms collapsing is a feature and not a defect. I moved from Digg to Reddit and felt no great loss that Digg no longer exists years later.
i think we're going to have to tolerate this discomfort!
More than just tolerate, I think you can find a certain amount of joy in this time of change and really relish something new, unusual and different. Just because it is new and uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to be unpleasant. Figuring out how to be sensitive to your own emotions and work through change quickly can get you there.
uh-huh..
I was kind of joking, really, sorry :)
I was saying it like the idea of having to to tolerate unpleasant feelings about this is a bit silly to me, as in what we're talking about is really not something that I would expect to evoke discomfort full stop. I think its interesting, sure, but if it goes well, super, and if coming on lemmy (which I actually have reasobably high hopes for) isn't enjoyable, then alas, you know?
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.
can we pin this one? on big sub there are times I just give up on reply or typed but then delete and never submit cause it doesn't make any sense. I'd argue that fediverse should probably auto split up so you are never so big that 1 community have over 10k "active" people. accounting people's schedule and time zone, 10k active sub is a lot of people already and you probably won't miss anything important in the world(say Technology or Games).
By active I mean people that actually do something, posts and comments. Up/down vote or just simple feed/link reader I don't think that counts as active.
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.
Differences in an instance’s culture and moderation is one reason I’m not too worried about fragmentation. If anything, I think it’ll be for the better. Even if there’s a lot of overlap in purpose between communities from different instances, the administration, moderation, and lay users of the communities will lend differences to how things feel. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious, sometimes it’s going to be subtle. Either way, I’m in favor of having more options. I think it increases the odds of finding a place that feels just right.
Yes the devs need to work on the multireddit feature that reddit themselves abandoned.
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.
Yup totally agreed.
I am also starting to pick up on the fact that (I think) a large amount of users never really went beyond the front page or /r/all. So, sure there are "main" subs for specific topics, but there is a very, very niche world of communities behind it all as well, and to your point, purposeful fractures of communities. I saw it a lot with the game-specific subs, where you might have a sub for news about the game and general discussion, one for memes, one for pvp or competitive, one for lfg or clan recruitment, etc. - it's a good thing.
That's also the nice thing about federated content and instances in that no single instance needs to (or should imo) try to be everything to everyone and it gives everyone involved so much more flexibility. I also think that last part is what some folks are struggling with as well - when there isn't a clear winner or "main" sub for <topic xyz>, but rather, quite a few options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities each with their own culture and vibe, it can certainly feel overwhelming. Reddit provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.
[edited for grammar]
This is the correct answer
Having options is good. The difference between /r/guitar and /r/guitars was insane because if the people in charge. But different strokes for different folks.
Right. You see this on Reddit all the time. The community would be split and part would splinter off and start a new sub.
This is actually what reddit was like in the early days. It took some time for the major subs to become dominant.
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.
I don't know if you're referring to me, but I've previously discussed this idea several times in similar posts' comments.
I think we could implement it as a separate server software that generically allows aggregation of ActivityPub feeds under separate ActivityPub feeds.
This sounds like a great idea but I'm wondering if this is best to go into the UI of an app, for instance. Making the lists of multi-subreddits easily sharable would be a big plus, that way it isn't just one person who controls who is allowed into the multi-subreddit.
Oh now that you mention it, a sharable link would be a must. This would promote curated "Awesome..." repos/links.
It would be ideal if it were part of the fediverse naming convention. For example "/m/multi-subreddit-name/c/group1@domain1/c/group2@domain2/..."
It would allow full transparency, the ability to update / change it... places could even provide URL shorteners for it.
Edit 2: formatting (come'on Lemmy don't let me down)
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.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
This solves your issue, it isn't a fundemantal problem, it's a growing pain.
I love this suggestion.
There's some problems that would need to be worked through, but ultimately I absolutely crave this being added in.
That and something like multi reddit groupings.
Of course, I would only like this if it were optional. I don't think it should be core or default.
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.
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
When I first starting shifting away from Reddit, I was nervous about whether I’d like having smaller communities. I’m definitely adapting more to it myself.
I remember coming to a similar realization with Discord servers. I started out with joining servers between friends and I figured that maybe I was missing out by not getting into some larger ones. I actively tried getting into a couple of servers that weren’t even all that big compared to some numbers I’ve heard before—the servers I’d try to get into were like, 3,000+ users typically?
The conversations always felt way too fast for me to get a word in, and it never felt like I had many chances to start conversations unless it was like 2am and most of the serve was asleep. Voice chat feels like I can’t even get my foot in the door. Server rules and policies paradoxically felt convoluted as well as nebulous. I make a solid attempt at integrating into the culture wherever I go, but I could never seem to do those servers right. I still stick around some of those servers now, but only because they play meaningful roles in communities I’m in.
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It feels radical to say, because I’m so used to equating Big Numbers and Lots of Content to being a healthy community, but maybe there really isn’t too much wrong with a smaller or slower community? That’s not to knock anyone who’d prefer the contrary, but I’m starting to realize that me personally, it’s those smaller places that I really enjoy, and that maybe I don’t give them enough credit. It takes more time for fresh content and talk to come in, but when it does, it feels meaningful and like I actually have a chance to be that someone who starts it in the first place. The moderation and culture feels much more in touch with the community there.
I hope Beehaw succeeds in whatever the community and its leadership wants it to be, but I hope that it holds on to its integrity and the philosophy it’s communicated so far, even if that means it leans toward a smaller feel. I think I kinda like that feel to it.
this is how these things start - there will be fragmentation until one community takes over the majority of the users.
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.
And you wont even see most of it if Beehaw keeps defederating
Defederating can be temporary, though. They can refederate later on once modding tools have improved etc. I don't really blame them for having to iron out some kinks with all of the extra influx of users, the graphs of the new users look crazy. I think it'll smooth out over time.
This was a temporary emergency measure, they're already talking to the admins of those instances to discuss when to federate again, had Lemmy had stronger federation and moderation tools already they would had done that already, Lemmy is still pretty new after all
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.
I feel conflicted about fragmentation;
On the one side, pooling resources into one centralized community can be really good for finding and sharing helpful information.
On the other side, groupthink and conflict. Not sure I need to elaborate, we've all experienced it and we've all been guilty of it.
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.
Email-server are even working with a whitelist, so even a more radical choice, just to keep every random user from spinning up their own servers and spamming everyone else without any limits.
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.
How can I find the biggest ones to follow suit? I thought we could carry usernames across servers. I guess I'm not following all this federated stuff very well after all.
This site has the servers listed: https://lemmyverse.net/
and from one login, you can subscribe to communities hosted on different servers, but communications seem to be rather laggy when you do that.
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.
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.
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.
I don't disagree. I want to see topic aggregation as soon as possible too.
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
Not really, the fact that all of the de facto communities for topics will be distributed across several instances is already superior to reddit.
The problem is that federation doesn't work very well just yet. I see different subscriber stats based on which instance I view from. It's very confusing for a new user.
It doesn't help that there are people trying to cybersquat on communities. I see a lot of mods create 20 new communities with no content. That's not helping anyone.
Well that wouldn't be true for someone that is on an instance that is defederated from the most active one, and even if that's not the case, I would only see posts in there from people that are not part of instances that are defederated by my instance. So depending on which instance I am, I'll see more or less posts on these comunities.
That's the major problem I see right now and for which I don't see any other solution than everyone creating their own instance for themselfes to be able to see everything.
We're in flux right now. Give it time, instances will stabilize, options beside "block the entire instance" will become available to admins, any instance that tries defederating popular instances will probably just die.
Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.
the side that talks at everyone and gets mad when people exercise their freedom from listening to everyone
You hold viewpoint A and claim that those that hold viewpoint B do it because they are mad because they don't get their way instead listening to the actual stated reason, such as OPs.
I think federation is absolutely interesting but this is definitely a consideration and pretending everyone that raises is "umad" or bad is not compelling. Communities online already have problems of "circlejerk" and extreme uniformity. This could easily foster that even more to a point where there's really no communities of significance. Just similar things to 20-100 people using a chat medium to share stuff.
My comment was in response to the implication that people who exercise their right to not listen to everyone talking are using defederation as some sort of weapon to fulfil their chaotic, destructive agenda while free-speech instances are merely open to any and all interactions like exemplary participants in a civilised democratic society.
If you actually want to know what my perspective is, I just wrote about it: https://mander.xyz/post/739439
Just read your post and I get its points. I don't see how combating one misrepresentation with a misrepresentation of your own improves the situation but at least I get what you're aiming to respond to now.
Even if you don't think it as ideological, there's some functionality/existencial aspects that make a discussion interesting. Instability and arbitrariness, if there's a lot of change without consistency and transparency, can lead to only people who value the authority's opinion.
In a way I'm trying to decide if in practice instance federation works like "this is my ball, and we'll do what I say when I say, and you accepted that because it's federation" or if there's a more open promise for stability. How much deep the fragmentation will go because of disagreements and how much friction does that cause on the end users when this happens (this is something you talk about when you mention the Identities across instances)
Maybe it's less prone to change and can provide more stability but an event like reddits current situation definitely brought about some chaos.
The mod post about talking with the other instance admins seems like it's not about animosity but amicably spoken ideological differences but that goes back to my point.
When something is so exclusive maybe it'll have to invest extra to not be misunderstood when it's shared often with a different pitch, using more centralized patterns that are known to "mainstream" social network/forum users.
I think this take makes the most sense. It seems like the totally free and open lemmy instances will do their best to re-create the Reddit that they came from. Other communities will aim for something more tight-knit (not unlike Discord servers). Both can co-exist, but it is hard to imagine the tight-knit ones taking much advantage of the federation features.
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.
How would posting with multi-subreddit work? Would it post copies to everything? Or would you still just post to one of them?
Posting would work just as it works now, the difference is how easy you can view the different communities. The idea is that it’s just like if you were for example just subscribed to different tech communities from other instances. Now you can switch your view to subscribed to only see all those tech threads.
The problem is when you are subscribed to more than just those tech communities, you can’t filter your view so that you still only have those tech communities on your page.
Multi-subreddits would do just that. You could group different communities together and view them as you view your subscribed list, only now you can have multiple of those lists with different communities in them
You're using this type of platform wrong, not just these fedderated websites but Reddit as well. You should subscribe to ALL the communities you want to see and then browse your subscriptions as a whole. In that way it is no different than Reddit, there are just way more options for major communities like tech. Which, as I have been telling everyone I can the past week, is a feature not a bug. We want the freedom of choice. The best communities should grow organically and the ones that are subpar will wither. Eventually those stronger communities will make up the bulk of your subscriptions.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like this:
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:
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.
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.
I think it's an early day sorta problem you are looking at. From the reddit point of view. r/technology just sorta became the default, but there are other tech news subs for sure.
Early reddit there were probably 100s of them and then everyone just found /r/technology and that's where you can get the most engagement.
I do think lemmy will need a way to create your own multi-community subs. So you can quickly click on your "tech" tree and see all the tech subs you've subscribed to.
behaw defederating though could cause issues, but I'd think over time that'll sort itself out as well.
End of the day people will settle into communities and eventually there will probably be a main tech place and that'll just be where you go. Just going to take some time for people to sort through it.
There are a lot of people on reddit that just post for karma or w/e reasons so we definitely have less content because we have less bots. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.. I'd also imagin eventually we'll have plenty of bots.
it's fragmentated but that's how federation works
I would see solution in third party app where you subscribe to communities and if they share same name like Technology then app will merge them together and also remove duplicate posts
If you have two friends called Peter, do you save both their numbers under the same name in your phones address book?
These communities are not the same, and hiding this from the users is just confusing them. You can easily subscribe to multiple "technology" communities in the existing apps if you have an interest in more than one.
Edit: duplicate posts when using the cross-post feature are already hidden by default.
@jon_010 @technology this is the problem of having generalist instances aiming to replace everything that was on Reddit.
When I grew up I could call local telephones without the area code. Now I can't. I managed.
Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:
It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!
Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like "best gaming mouse kbin" via Google?
Assuming those posts actually wind up here, yes.
The problem isn't that there are a lot of communities serving the same interest. The problem is that it's hard to see all the communities so that you can pick one or more to join. Reddit had its default front page -- and later r/popular -- which aided in subreddit discovery. You can't get this across all Lemmy instances yet. The best you can do is view all the Lemmy communities in a big instance. This works somewhat well, because Lemmy lets you see how many users of an instance have subscribed to a remote community as well as a local one.
At Lemmy.ninja we have a community dedicated to community discovery to help assist in this process. Our thinking is that once you know a community exists and can see how active it is, you can join it (along with the other related communities) and test it out until you get a nice comfortable community list to function in.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Yes this is a good callout. Kbin/Lemmy need to get better about cross searching various instances. Build in the https://lemmyverse.net/ functionality without having to browse to another site.
I think you have got it slightly wrong. You're correct that you can't just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you're subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.
I think your concern is a common one, but what you're seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.
Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn't. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they'll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.
The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.
I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you're subbed to.
I agree wholeheartedly with @macracanthorhynchus but I also have my own hypothesis about how things will evolve.
The special thing that Forums had that was mostly missing from the centralised reddit subs was the sense of intimacy within the community. Specifically to the extent that you would get to know some of the members despite the anonymity.
The Fediverse allows us to have the best of both worlds in this respect. You'll pay special attention to the communities you are fond of, while at the same time keeping an eye on the rest.
Anyway, that's just my half baked prediction, but I hope it comes true!
Agreed!
People keep talking about the appeal of the megacommunities on Reddit, and I'm like... were they really that great? There was so much noise to sift through to get to anything real. Having decent discussions or building communities? Maybe if you're in a small niche subreddit, but otherwise no.
right? Like you see a top voted comment is full of BS and tried to point out the mistakes or debate/argue, on popular sub it's nearly impossible as your reply would be buried by other comments that ride the karma wave before you see it. So the best you can do is try to find the reply that maybe says what you want to upvote that and down vote other mindless drone or bots, then hope for the best.
The one great thing about mega communities with long histories is recommendations. I would go to r/movies and search through old "what's the best [x] movie" a LOT. Or in my city sub, "where's the best burger", etc
But yeah, I think the bad mostly outweighs the good.
Yes, if. That assumes they all searched for (or even !discovered) all the distributed communities. This would be visible as all communities having the exact same subscriber count.
In practice, most users will only subscribe to one or two communities, and subscriber counts will vary wildly. In practice, there is fragmentation (though that's neither necessarily a bad thing nor is it meaningfully different from reddit).
That's an important point and very relevant in the context of the migration from reddit (which would not have happened if spez had only power over one or some instances, not all), and the context of the recent defederation event.
I got the feeling we as a lemmy community should want our communities to be fragmented across many instances. Not sure if more than a handful gives any further advantages, but having only one significant community on one particular instance makes the whole of lemmy very dependent on the administration of that instance.
That would be great! I also hope search and discovery will be improved.
Ideally yes, but for a more niche community, federation is slower and posts don't get pushed through. I can see a lot of confusion when someone creates a niche sub because they thought it didn't exist, when in reality it does, and they were just the first to search for it from their server.
Honestly I don't think it matters, because Ihis exact thing happened after I created m/dryherbvapes, just a few hours before m/vaporents and !vaporents were created. I added them to the sidebar, subscribe and join into discussion on all three.
As far as I am concerned there is room for different communities with their own vibes about the same subject on the Web. I mean it happens in real life so why not?
Anyway kbin has a feature where it recommends similar magazines so that will be a huge opportunity for cross pollination once everything gets indexed fully.
Edit: typo
Posts do get pushed through, its just been a period of heavily increased traffic the last week or so, and many instances have had to tame measures to stay online at all, which in many cases has broken or slowed down the propagation.
These are issues that will be resolved in time
https://lemmyverse.net/communities (not affiliated, but I think it's the best discovery tool I've found so far)
Something like this should be integrated into every lemmy instance!
I use this one - https://browse.feddit.de/
.... they probably serve similar purpose?
Yeah! I use both, but the feddit one doesn’t have a good sort function (that I could find anyway). In the Lennyverse one is easier to find active communities IMO.
I've had the same thoughts. I'm new to this like a lot of others so there is a learning curve but I have the same fears you do, that I will miss much of what is out there because I don't know what is available. For example, do I have to be subscribed to the Technology community on every instance?
My biggest fear for Lemmy is that it is going to end up being walled-off silos. I think we are already seeing that in motion with Beehaw defederating lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I won't comment on whether that was the right move or not (leave that to wiser people than I) but ff that happens across the platform it could become horribly fractured.
Not sure what the future will bring but I am hopeful that new features will evolve as more people get involved.
I think that's just uniquely a beehaw thing. it's what results when you have a small number of moderators and a desire for a strict way of engaging and moderating. other instances naturally will grow faster and it'll be overwhelming, leading to defederation. I think many instances don't have this philosophy, so they're not exactly going to defederate each other.
Those are two different communities. The same as they would be on Reddit. Literally different names.
Communities are hosted on one a synced with others. So technology will be the same on all servers as long as they haven't defederated each other.
I think the idea is that in the end only one will "survive". Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers, whilst technology@lemmy.ml has only 750 subscribers, and that's the second biggest (unless i got this totally wrong)
strange, it's showing me here 1609 subscribers here through kbin, or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?
I think so, yes (though still learning). From my point of view (lemmy.click, just 83 users):
I think this shows the number of lemmy.click accounts subscribed to these remote communities.
But when I open the communities in their home instances, I get a different picture:
I think it's kbin users, i'm messing with my own lemmy instance and it only shows local subscribers for anything federated (including this sublemmy)
Idk, but if that's the case than we have a huge problem lol, because that would mean the users of each instance would tend to prefer that instance's communities, thus helping fragmentation.
Edit: just checked from lemmy.ml, and it's showing 15.5k for its community, and 1.62k for beehaw's I wonder if having something like a "cross-instance counter" is something the developers have in mind
I'm waiting for better control over filtering to be able to see what I want - the duplicate communities are a good example, being able to select all technology instances would be handy. Although will people in each one be posting the same material...perhaps we could have all the comments viewed at once while we're at it. But that makes you consider what's the point of having all these instances in the first place.
maybe they could add a feature where users can set their own meta communities, like a custom collection from all the various instances
Sure, but what about r/AmazingTechnology, r/InsaneTechnology, r/AskTechnology, r/TechnologyProTips etc etc. You'd have to be subbed to all of those in order to see all technology posts. And you probably are, because there's no penalty in being subscribed to many subs.
True. But in due time you'll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the "go to" community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We're still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their "own thing". Maybe that's fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).
And all posts from all of these communities are shown in your home feed, so it's not like you miss discussions. There's no penalty for subscribing to all of them.
The only "fragmentation" that could happen is if one instance decides to defederate the other instances. That effectively "locks" their content from everyone else. And that is a shame. But it happens sometimes. Because instances are their own thing aimed for their own particular audiences.
Hopefully something like the "multireddit" system can be implemented so users can make custom groups of communities to view as a single feed.
This is basically already how the Subscribed feed works, at least on kbin. I feel like creating your own categories is just one extra step there
You could theoretically do that with accounts on different instances, and tailor each account to a specific list of magazines.
Looks like something along those lines is already suggested here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/65
It's never a bad idea to add a thumbs up to show that people want the feature
Agreed. Like the above poster mentioned, the same issue has existed on Reddit, but it's had much more time for "winners and losers" to emerge from the battle for members. I do have to say I still don't know how to search for communities here (I'm on Kbin), and it would be very convenient to be able to type "technology" or whatever and see a list of all named communities across all instances currently being federated with, and then have the option to aggregate them into a single feed.
Beehaw in particular is difficult to find the correct syntax to search on kbin. If you're signed into your kbin account, and you enter the url https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org you'll get to this community. Likewise, https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org is the beehaw science community, etc
As for finding communities in the first place, I just open a new tab and go to https://beehaw.org/communities
I don't think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn't dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.
But they are not "duplicates". !technology@slrpnk.net is about Solarpunk technology etc.
And even for "technology" communities on general purpose instances: the naming is completely arbitrary and also on Reddit there were always communities with overlapping thematic areas.
The problem is not that there are different communities with somewhat overlapping themes (which is absolutely unavoidable) but some strange sense of FOMO because they happen to be named similarly. But that is just a mind-set issue that is IMHO very un-healthy.
It's my 2nd day here. I love fediverse. Imagine that i write to you from mastodon. This thing have a lot of potential.
We are integrated and fragmented at the same time. Mind-blowing but i love this.
It's like writing from twitter to reddit user, this is insane. <3
IMO this is just a temporary problem - as communities establish themselves one will eventually become dominant. E.g. /c/technology@beehaw.org might become the dominant technology community, while others die out or stay small.
What you need to understand is that "lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit" is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other "reddits".
The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren't "the same one community split fragmented" they're separate communities.
so while I can post in here on technology@beehaw.org it's very much the case and obvious to me that it's separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our technology@kbin.social which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.
In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren't the same thing.
I know y'all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don't exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I'm in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn't help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.
tl;dr: they're different communities, not the same community split among instances.
edit: it's also worth noting that us kbinauts aren't even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.
I'm hoping (actually, expecting-- if we're being honest) that features are added to reddit-esque apps like lemmy and kbin that allow you to make personal groups of magazines/communities. This would very nearly solve the fragmentation "problem". Better yet if they add a way to share these personal groups to be imported by others.
Then we would get the benefits that come with decentralization, but without the detriments that come along with it.
Can I reply to beehaw posts from kbin?
Edit: It worked!
Very well put. I'd like to add, that it's actually a good thing that the fediverse is "fragmented" because then the power vacuum that happened on reddit can't easily happen here.
That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.
End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.
I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.
But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.
There's a sweet spot. A dead forum is of no use to anyone. Reddit had a good few years where there were enough users to have a good exchange of information, and not a sea of low effort posts. I think it all changed when they started advertising their app and "new reddit" on Facebook.
Well, define "dead", because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.
People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.
Huh? No, I'd say the opposite, the fediverse is in the sweet spot right now.
Ugh, yes, it's unfortunate that popularity ruined so many subs. We've all watched a tonne of them turn into generic repost mills over the years.
Hard disagree.
Tiktok is popular. Its hold very little value to lots of people though. Same thing with twitter.
For me, reddits value was from its popularity amongst a certain demographic, which was largely the techies. At this point enough techies have come over to the fediverse that so far its meeting or exceeding the reddit itch.
Id rather a community of 10,000 people who are mostly tech driven than a community of 10,000,000 with 10,000 techy types. Popular reddit posts had thousands of the same played out comments and comment chains languishing at the bottom of threads. Popular threads on the fediverse so far have people engaging in conversation without a collapsed thread of 4000 ignored posts at the bottom.
Popularity means nothing when its mostly people with nothing worthwhile to say except the same played out jokes and memes
I love that "kbinauts" is gaining traction
I wish kbin made it more obvious what instance a given thread in your feed is from. If it's from lemmy, I know I can post memes and I should be prepared for flame wars. If it's from beehaw, I know I can have a thoughtful and respectful conversation. I'm okay with either, but I don't want to accidentally write an essay on lemmy that no one will read, or pick a fight on beehaw with someone who had no ill intent.
If it's from kbin I know we'll spend some time talking about how great everything is and how we're all just stoked to be here 😁
I feel like it's just me posting kbinauts everywhere lol. also I love your assessment on the different communities :)
A native support for distinguishable instance indicator will be awesome, in the meantime, you can use this userscript https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468612-kbin-enhancement-script
I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.
anime_titties, you say?
Yes, here's an archive link bc it's private now
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
I don't think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.
Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community's values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.
It may actually help if you view an instance as the community, with its "communities" as its topics.
I'm not sure how Lemmy works, but over on kbin I can set up my magazine (collection of threads similar to a subreddit) to autofederate content based on certain tags. For example, I run the DwarfFortress magazine, and I have it set up to automatically federate content in the fediverse based on the existence of a #dwarffortress tag. Now, I haven't seen that happen yet, so I'm not 100% if it works or not, but it looks like the option is potentially there.
I'm posting this from kbin, so I don't know if you will see this, but I thought Magazine was a group set up by kbin (like a sub-reddit, with a specific name). Are you saying that a kbin Magazine is something I set up myself with my own collection of content?
Like subreddits, a magazine can be set up by anyone. Hell - even I set one up :)
No, you had it right the first time. I'm saying if you subscribe to a magazine, there's a good chance that magazine is autofederating content based on tags, so you are getting more from the magazine than just what is deliberately posted into that magazine.
Oh how do you do that auto federation thing?
it's not quite "auto federation". but if you create/moderate a magazine you can set "tags" in the magazine settings that will automatically pull in microblog posts from elsewhere on the fediverse.
When you set up a magazine you have a section at the bottom of the 'magazine panel' (basically mod settings) where you can add #tags. Articles in the fediverse with that tag automagically show up in the magazine*
*terms and conditions apply beta software may not always perfom as expected etc etc
Whoa, no way! ![https://img.ecosia.org/390x,sc/http://media.giphy.com/media/2rqEdFfkMzXmo/giphy.gif] (url)
I need to go edit my community
Hi! wasn't really a readittor but def used it for the #dwarffortress stuff. How do I find your magazine here? just signed up here at readit.buzz and not seeing it either with the reg search or the magazine search itself.
@pixelpusher220 Hmm, I haven't ran into anybody using readit.buzz yet, but I'm willing to try to help you out! The first thing I would do is make sure that if there is an option for federation to turn it on. Maybe ask within the readit.buzz community how to do this. This is early days for a lot of the tools and instances springing up, so there are still kinks being worked out possibly as well there.
I know I can reference and link to my sub by referencing it as @DwarfFortress
@DwarfFortress@kbin.socialMaybe clicking on that above within readit.buzz will direct you to be able to subscribe?
In a pinch if you wanted to view the magazine directly, it is at https://kbin.social/m/DwarfFortress
ETA: The magazine names are usually case sensitive
Much appreciated. My Federation setting is On but lists no instances so seemingly I'd guess that's a reasonable guess at the problem. Appreciate the heads up on case sensitivity. I guess readit.buzz is fairly small, which is ironic b/c it's run by @supernovae of the bigger Universeodon.com Masto site haha
Got it. the Magazine page search doesn't find it but your full @DwarfFortress in the regular search does find it! Thank you!
@pixelpusher220 Awesome, glad I could help!
This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.
Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.
Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.
If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.
I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn't matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I'll just get them all in my feed. I'm following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn't care less where it comes from, as long as I'm following I'm good to go.
There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.
This software is so new, and it has lots of potential.
I can see someone building an extension that aggregates many versions of the same sublemmy into one feed seamlessly, and then the feature being added to the main lemmy code.
This will evolve and improve the more we use it.
Bluesky is working on a fix. They have a global identity system where you can move all your data (posts, likes, followers, blocks) to another instance if you get banned. The only thing that changes is your handle.
These things have a way to sort themselves out with time so no point in stressing over it.
Once "multi-reddits" have been defined and implemented in kbin that shouldn't be an issue. I don't know what'll happen with lemmy, but it would probably be in its interest to implement it too.
You're right on that part. Federations works great with mastodon and its instances made of individuals directly interacting with each other's accounts.
But when it comes to interacting though communities already spread through instances, not only it makes it hard for people to follow all these duplicates, but it threatens the very principle of federation in a certain way. Because most people will eventually subscribe to the biggest community for each subject (tech, nature, photo), which often turns out to be hosted on the biggest instances...and that is centralization once again.
A solution could be for users to gather all the communities they subscribed to around topics. Then your feed would be a mix of these topics' groups and singles /c. Twitter does that similarly with its List feature.
Fragmentation is certainly a problem if you’re looking for Reddit-style cohesive communities, how much of a problem it is remains to be seen in my opinion. The risk with trying to do things the Reddit way is that one or two large instances become dominant and you’ve just got Reddit all over again.
One potential solution that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the concept of “meta communities” - collections of smaller related communities across the fediverse that can be subscribed to and interacted with as if they were one, sort of like multi-Reddits. Users could potentially vote on a smaller community being admitted into the meta community, or there could be some other requirement. It could even be done locally by the user through a browser extension. It’s not perfect but it’s maybe something to explore.
Alternatively we just get used to more compact communities again. Let’s be honest - do we really have to know everything, all of the time?
To me this fragmentation is one of the strongest suits. Instead of putting everyone who is interesting in technology together, (which is an very large group of people), you can subdivide people. Take AI/LLMs for example. There's a group of people who is really interested by them and tries to use these technologies as much as possible. Theres also a group of people who is very critical of the harms and negative side effects of LLMs. Instead of mashing them together in a single community, both can now discuss the same news from their own standpoint.
And no, I'm not concerned about filter bubbles. I think the problem is the opposite, the idea that we have to force people in the same space who do not want to be together in the same space. Just like we dont do that in real life, people should gather around with the people they want to be with.
There's 2 things to consider.
First since this is all relatively new there's a bit of a gold rush for starting communities, eventually a couple of major communities across instances will emerge for different topics and those will stick, this will make things a bit less impractical from the point of view of an average user.
Second is if we ever get functionality on lemmy to create the equivalent of a multireddit, where you can group as many communities as you want into a single curated view (either for yourself or shared to the instance) then this becomes a non-issue.
Right now it might be a problem, but in the long term the communitys work it out themselves, reddit also had 10 different (general) memes subreddits.
As long as the instances are federated you can find their communitys pretty easily and participate there
Exactly. Federation was supposed to promote liberal progress but just ended up being highly moderated policing 🤷♂️