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!
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.
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.