Technology

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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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[–] macracanthorhynchus@mander.xyz 5 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I think you have got it slightly wrong. You're correct that you can't just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you're subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.

I think your concern is a common one, but what you're seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.

Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn't. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they'll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.

The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.

I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you're subbed to.

[–] Spzi@lemmy.click 4 points 2 years ago

If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they’ll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.

Yes, if. That assumes they all searched for (or even !discovered) all the distributed communities. This would be visible as all communities having the exact same subscriber count.

In practice, most users will only subscribe to one or two communities, and subscriber counts will vary wildly. In practice, there is fragmentation (though that's neither necessarily a bad thing nor is it meaningfully different from reddit).

Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.

That's an important point and very relevant in the context of the migration from reddit (which would not have happened if spez had only power over one or some instances, not all), and the context of the recent defederation event.

I got the feeling we as a lemmy community should want our communities to be fragmented across many instances. Not sure if more than a handful gives any further advantages, but having only one significant community on one particular instance makes the whole of lemmy very dependent on the administration of that instance.

I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you’re subbed to.

That would be great! I also hope search and discovery will be improved.

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