With reddit we mostly had a single subreddit for a given topic, for the sake of the question let’s use gaming. If there were alternative subreddits dedicated to the same topic, they had names that gave that away. Do you think Lemmy will lead to more segmentation, and more information bubbles seeing as we now can have gaming@x and gaming@y without a obvious way to see which community is the “default” one? Will it be a good thing, as you can find a community that suits your preferences better, or will it stifle discussion?
It will, but I think at least in the short term it’s a good thing. Lemmy.ml was hit hard yesterday, and despite that, I was still able to participate in discussion from many other servers.
I think over time, Lemmy will be improved to present these external communities a bit more cleanly. And when that happens, I hope that communities across different servers “mesh together” in such a way that they don’t feel separate at all. And if any of those component servers ever have issues, the remaining servers that are online can continue to have discussions, rather than the entire community just grinding to a halt.