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?
I think people are worrying about it too much.
On Reddit, there were tons of duplicates. r/tumblr and r/CuratedTumblr. r/animemes and r/animememes and r/goodanimemes. r/gaming and r/games.
For Magic the Gathering there was r/magicTCG, r/mtg, r/magicthecirclejerking, r/MagicArena, r/EDH, r/mtgmemes, r/mtgfinance, r/ModernMagic, r/Pauper, r/mtgbrawl, r/DinosaursMTG, a bunch more, plus probably a dozen more I didn’t even know about.
Dungeons & Dragons had r/DnD, r/dndnext, r/onednd, r/DungeonsandDragons, r/DnDMemes, r/3d6, and again, lots more.
If there are enough people in each community, great! More communities! If not, that’s still okay! People will naturally gravitate towards more active communities. A lot of the duplicate communities will eventually figure themselves out and one will become the “main community.” We just have to wait a bit. For now I’m just subscribing to anything that matches my interest to see what happens with it.
And if all MTG fans are subbed to all 10 of the different MTG communities, and participate in each of them regardless of instance… where’s the problem? And then if one mod goes on a power trip or one instance crashes, the other duplicate instances will just fill the void. Of everyone is still subbed to the duplicate communities, I can only see this as a positive.
There is no “default” community. The community with the most engagement is the one that will survive.
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.
I see it as a good thing - like you say, people can find the community that suits them, just as fans of a football side can join one (non-Reddit/Lemmy) forum or another (or both).
Likely one or two communities on any given topic will become the dominant ones over time, but for now I think it’s good that there’s a chance to kind of start over with communities following their own principles and ideas.
What might be good would be if communities of the same topic were to agree to crosslink to each other in their sidebars (much as the sfwporn network did on Reddit).
I think keeping them as separate communities with separate mods is a good thing though, it lets the subscribers decide if a community is what they want, without it being the only game in town.
What might be good would be if communities of the same topic were to agree to crosslink to each other in their sidebars (much as the sfwporn network did on Reddit).
That’s a great idea!
Yeah, it would be good for promoting community spirit I think.
Of course, there’s always the chance of it becoming a bit of an ego fight, mods refusing to crosslink to rival mods’ community, but it would hopefully work most of the time.
One possible case is people who are invested in this enough might build an instance dedicated to a community and people might gravitate towards that. Say, gaming@lemmygame. It is just names anyway.
That is indeed a problem that can happen, as I saw other people commenting about this issue.
I am somewhat optimistic that people will gravitate towards the bigger communities, making them the unofficial defaults. But there is the risk of people being split into lots of smaller ones, which may cause them to die due to low traction.
Sure, there will be one community that is the community for a particular subject. For example, there’s no good reason to subscribe to several communities for “Springfield Massachusetts”. The most popular one of going to be the standard.
But maybe different “Politics” communities will have different leanings and contributors that you value for different reasons - and they can each go strong.
The thing is, no single server should have all your subscriptions. You might get news from Beehaw, games from .ml and do a book club through Kbin.
Because no server/instance owns all of it, the federation checks and balances itself. If users are unhappy with mods or administrators, or whatever - there is a choice. They also don’t have to delete the app they use (when apps start rolling out officially. I’m beta testing some).
There is competition for users - and that’s a good thing. It means that user experience will come first.
Big thing is to first search ALL communities (not just in local instance) before creating a new ‘subreddit’. Some appear to be linked (like Tech groups) because when I posted I saw a note about it being cross-posted.
But certainly from Beehaw, I saw the various Lemmy communities listed, and I did a join from there (says subscription pending still). This would cut down on segmentation / fragmentation.
