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!)

  • ethane
    1•1 year ago

    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.

    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.

    • nude
      1•1 year ago

      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

    • Friend
      1•1 year ago

      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