I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn’t federating new posts.

But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.

I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I’ll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!

  • Debo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes, and this is part of the problem. The great thing about an aggregation site is that it’s a collective place for ALL posts about a single topic, say /r/Technology. With Lemmy, you might have DOZENS of /c/technology communities and for you to get the VALUE of the MASS of users, you’d need to subscribe to them all. This is a significant barrier to mass adoption as “my wife” won’t be bothered to go out to many servers and subscribe to many communities just to get a reasonable flow of content.

    • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think it will be as much of a big deal as people think. Before the major aggregate sites, there’s been web forums. Nobody had a problem with it, even novices users.

      Second, it’s not like it wasn’t happening on Reddit anyway. For example there was r/askscience and r/sciencediscussion. Splinter subreddits were very common, and you might want to sub to 3 or 4 to keep up just with one topic.

      It may actually be a good thing, because similar looking places may have a different feel/scope.

      I mean, on Lemmy you can also specify a display name, i.e. a short description right on the home screen.

      Finally, it tends sort itself on its own. I’ve already seen one example where 4 communities with the same name popped op, and after one ran away with popularity, another one shut down and the last two just link to the now “main” one. I suspect it will often be the case that just one or a small handful will grow to be major, and the rest will wither off.

      Let’s wait a bit, these are just the super early days remember.

      • Debo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re totally right. It’s gonna take a few months to see some clear patterns develop. Reddit only had 8000 some odd active subs. The best should rise to the top quickly.