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!)
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.