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/[email protected], /c/[email protected], 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!)
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.