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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[–] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.

Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.

I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.

But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.

[–] LChitman@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Ugh, yes, it's unfortunate that popularity ruined so many subs. We've all watched a tonne of them turn into generic repost mills over the years.

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a sweet spot. A dead forum is of no use to anyone. Reddit had a good few years where there were enough users to have a good exchange of information, and not a sea of low effort posts. I think it all changed when they started advertising their app and "new reddit" on Facebook.

[–] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, define "dead", because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.

People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead

Huh? No, I'd say the opposite, the fediverse is in the sweet spot right now.