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!)

  • ch1cken@kbin.social
    7·
    1 year ago

    it’s resulting in fragmentation

    this is a GOOD thing, its the whole point of federation*

    • if an instance becomes corrupt due to an owners greed or someone becoming the next spez, the entirety of lemmy/kbin wouldn’t be affected as a result, only the particular communities on that instance. Which makes migrating between instances easier, and prevents the possibility of lemmy/kbin turning into reddit/twitter.
    • it distributes load, rather than dumping all hundreds of thousands of users on one server which would make everything slower
    • different instances would have different views on moderation and allowed content, which may align better with your views and usecase.
    • different instances have different privacy policies

    *if implemented correctly, lemmy/kbin should have fragmented communities but in a way that wouldn’t inconvenience the user. Currently the search tool is lacking on both, however there are centralised search tools like https://browse.feddit.de/ and https://lemmyverse.net/ which you can use to find communities.