this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Technology

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I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jon_010@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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!)

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[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] kobra@readit.buzz 2 points 1 year ago

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.