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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[–] rimlogger@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From your post, I don’t think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.

I was very much into Internet forums as a child and posted on quite a few. But I didn't go on any of the general discussion boards, I focused those on specific topics or niches. That is what's missing with the fediverse today. Everyone is trying to provide a Reddit alternative right now but forget what made Internet forums of old great - their singular focus on a particular topic, community, or subject.

[–] Dr_Cog@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of the forums I've used didn't focus on a single topic or subject. It was usually made up of people sharing a general interest, but there were always boards within each forum for either general discussion or more focused discussion on a particular topic like movies, games, art, philosophy, etc

[–] rimlogger@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

That's fair. Everyone has a different way of doing things.

[–] Maven@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know that they're forgetting it. Both types of forum exist here. There's plenty of general-purpose instances, but there's plenty of specific instances too. At a casual glance, maybe a third of the instances on the join-lemmy list? startrek.website is a Star Trek-focused instance. programming.dev is a programming-focused instance. lennygrad.ml is a marxism-focused instance. There's a wet shaving instance, there's a cyberpunk instance, there's a solarpunk instance, there's a magic: the gathering instance, there's a dungeons and dragons instance, there's a pathfinder instance, there's SEVERAL furry instances, there's a general anime/manga instance and also instances for specific anime or manga, hell there's an instance just for butts.

If you want to join a focused instance and focus on that topic, just like old-style forums, that's already just a thing you can do. You don't have to take advantage of federation.