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!)
On Reddit you also have multiple subreddits on technology. Especially when Reddit was just starting out several people started technology subreddits. It is just that you only visited the one most popular with the most users and most content. Which built up over quite some time. I think it is weird to expect Lemmy instances to be exactly like Reddit is now, when you consider Reddit is 17(!) years old.
While there will be a few instances which are very niche because they get defederated from anyone else and they may have a technology community as well, for the bigger, federated instances there will be the one big technology community again.
Currently people all over the fediverse start new communities without checking if they already exist. This won’t go on indefinitely…
Nothing to add here. Thank you.
Reddit 16 year club here
Can confirm
I think the difference is entry points. You’d start with /r/gaming - but you may eventually unsubscribe from that and subscribe to more niche gaming subreddits or even game specific subreddits. The day one Reddit experience is significantly more digestible compared to Lemmy. Content and community discovery isn’t as easy on Lemmy either.
It’ll get better with time though. The tech needs time to improve and the ecosystem needs time to grow. Contributing to those two things will be what allows issues like difficult onboarding and difficulty discovering content to naturally solve themselves.
On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.
Yep I followed multiple subs with overlapping content, especially with technology, PC hardware, etc etc
There are 2 car-enthusiast subreddits. /r/autos and /r/cars. Years ago they were planning to merge because they were so similar. Some disagreement between the direction caused them to not merge and actually differentiate. Now /r/cars doesn’t allow image posts to foster more discussion while /autos can be more about looking at cool cars. I think similar things will happen to Lemmy
I agree that something similar will happen over time. I think there’ll inevitably be overlap between instances and their communities, and that overlap will stymy discussions to a degree. But I also think that instances and their communities will gradually begin to develop their niches and have different strokes for different folks. Beehaw may be more attractive to having a friendlier or more cultivated group and discussion, another instance could lean toward corralling the banter and memes, and another still could be the best fit for media.
I think the most powerful thing about platforms like Lemmy, even if instances aren’t in federation and even if multiple accounts end up needing to be juggled, is that Lemmy makes creating communities and instances like Reddit so much more accessible. Reddit is no longe the only place to get an experience with a format like Reddit, and I think that’s a big win.
The fragmentation is not inherent to how Lemmy works - the exact same fragmentation can and does happen on Reddit. Just a random example: https://imgur.com/inXBMMA
On Reddit, it usually works out in the end in one way or another. Either mods decide to team up and combine their communities, or the users just naturally pick one community as the “winner”.
things are better on reddit because only a single
communitysubreddit can have one name vs on lemmy where every server can have the same community name - but the end result should be the same in both cases.I think people will eventually get used to the idea that the name of a community is not just the part before the “@”.
I mean, even regular people have no difficutly understanding that e-mail addresses like bob@google.com and bob@microsoft.com are two different “identifiers” and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” are different names
Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” are different names
I think this is exactly what OP is trying to point out - they are two different communities, when on reddit there would only be one - therefore the fragmentation.
on reddit there would only be one
The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for “Blue Protocol”, apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.
The phenomenon exists for all systems where there is no central authority deciding names and categories, which is true for both reddit and lemmy. Individual users can decide to create a new group regardless of existing groups, for a variety of reasons. This naturally leads to some duplicates.
The person you were talking to started the conversation with a screenshot showing 5 subreddits for “Blue Protocol”, apparently a MMORPG. Similar examples exist for almost any subject big enough.
they were all different names, there could be only one BlueProtocol.
And as sunaurus said, they all have different names on Lemmy too, once you realize you need to count the entire identifier and not just the part before the @.
On reddit you’d have /r/tech and /r/technology, both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. On Lemmy you’ll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names. Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they’ll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.
On Lemmy you’ll have /c/tech@instance1 and /c/tech@instance2 both serving the same thing but with clearly different names.
on reddit you have r/tech and r/technology, the analogue on lemmy would be /c/tech@instance1, /c/tech@instance2, …, /c/technology@instance1, /c/technology@instance2, … - the chance for fragmentation is much greater.
Eventually one will win out and the other will wither away. Or they’ll diverge enough to make subscribing to both worthwhile.
Agreed. This is exactly what I’ve been saying as well.
And like some other commenters have said: Lemmy is still very new and no standards and a lot of UX features still need to emerge. I am of the opinion that this fragmentation is a symptom of a UX problem and not inherent to anything specific to Lemmy.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances and provide a way for the user to view them by subscriber, popularity or newest, for example. But right now, it relies on the user to initiate a subscription to a community in another server for server discovery.
I could see a list of “popular instances” emerging at some point as a means for instance maintainers to prepopulate this in the future.m and Lemmy to support importing such a list to seed federation on new instances.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances
Thankfully it looks like this sort of thing is already on the radar.
We can just subscribe to both though. I think we can even cross post. At least I’ve seen some things that look like cross posts. Frankly, I don’t see any difference.
Ah yes, /r/technology, the only technology subreddit on reddit. There certainly has never existed a https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/, or / https://www.reddit.com/r/technewstoday/ or a bunch of more technology subreddits. No. Of course there ever only was /r/technology. No fragmentation whatsoever on reddit.
Thats what a lot of people don’t understand. There were always duplicates
But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That’s not fragmentation.
You can easily subscribe to all the technology communities here as well, it’s just two clicks sometimes instead of one.
thats fine as long as there aren’t the same posts in all of them!
Then you don’t need all
Honestly I feel like it’s still a big hassle to subscribe to communities outside of your instance.
If you find it from your instance it’s fine, but if you’re on the source URL the whole “copy to the search box” is really a hassle.
Lol.
Another example, a random game, Overwatch:
-Overwatch
-overwatch2
-OverwatchTMZ
-OverwatchLFT
-OverwatchPS4
-OverwatchLore
-OverwatchLeague
-CompetitiveOverwatch
-Overwatch_Memes
-OverwatchUniversity
-OWconsoles
-OverwatchCollector
Fragmentation has it’s benefits in this kind of format too, maybe you’re just interested in an aspect of something, not 15 memes a day or drama. You can easily fit everything into one sub, who would want that though.
The thing you getting wrong is if you go to /r/technology you are only seeing one subreddit on Reddit. It is not all Technology forums on the internet nor is it even all the Tech stuff on Reddit. You never see it all. The world is big, you never will. You just though you were because Reddit is well known, and the Technology sub-reddit is well known to you. You made a choice just to use that subreddit still and Reddit has no interest in federating with other sites. At least on the Fediverse you can see most things on the Fediverse if you choose.
This is a good way of describing it. Personally I’m finding that the fediverse is helping me to challenge those old reddit habits of just getting everything from one place. Reddit essentially became THE internet for me and the more I used it, the less I ventured out.
I agree. Even though I always knew there was more then Reddit, Reddit kind of becomes the place. For me included, even though I have used Forums of all sorts for over 40 years. So thinking Reddit is the only place is what they want you to think and it is easy to start thinking that way. Frankly it takes some un-thinking to actually come to one’s senses.
the less I ventured out.
That’s turned out to be a big thing for me, too. When I was younger, I’d spend literally hours a day on StumbleUpon some days, just clicking through niche sites I’d never find otherwise, and submitting new ones I found that I thought other people would like. It was a competition to find the most interesting little-known sites! Now I spend 70% of my browsing time on Reddit, just passively seeing what other people have found.
It’s time to get back out there!
Give it time. Big communities will form, and unlike Reddit, there will be more competition between them. You won’t just have one group of mods squatting over “Apple” or “Android” because they registered it first.
That’s the worst, someone gets the name first and they’ve ruled as mods ever since. Subs never rotate mods or rules and it goes unchecked. Here if you don’t like it, start your own
This is definitely a great post. The only thing that I think would help also would be discoverability and user choice, but it’s obviously easy to say without working on it.
Reddit had relatively consistent discoverability, but the whole “federation” aspect (which is the whole point) makes a very different landscape to wade through.
Definitely, this is a milestone for a new wave of “early adopters”. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:
- Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
- Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct
By having multiple instances, you aren’t bound by a single ToS or Code of Conduct, you can pick whatever instance you want that matches the content you want to post to a community.
For example, the same “Technology” community could be on:
- an instance directed to kids
- an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
- an instance that discusses weapons technology
Having the community limited to a single instance, would never allow the different discussions each combination of instance:topic would allow, even if the topic is technically the same in all cases.
Forcing communities from multiple instances to merge, would also break the ToS of some of them.
So the logical solution is for the user to decide which instance:communities they want to follow and participate in, respecting the particular ToS and Code of Conduct of each.
On Reddit, the r/Technology community needs to follow a single set of ToS and Code of a Conduct. If you try to discuss something that meets the topic but is not allowed, then you will get banned, possibly from all of Reddit.
I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?
You could even say it’s neither. Different communities can have different vibes and choice can be good (I’m sure at one point we will be able to define our own multi-communities as well). And Reddit has a similar setup where multiple subs for one topic can be created, so I don’t see it as really that different. It’ll probably coalesce together over time.
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own “meta communities”.
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
While I haven’t spent time looking at kbin, isn’t that essentially what it does with its ‘magazines’? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.
Afaik „magazines“ are just Lemmys „communities“ or reddits „subreddits“
Oh. I didn’t really realize that. But in looking at a few Magazines I follow, I only see content from my kbin.social instance, not any other instance. It’s also possible that what you’re saying is the intended functionality of kbin, but it might not be working yet since it isn’t a mission critical feature.
I was thinking of something like that too, where if I want to post about a game, I can tag my post in ‘gaming’ as such so others can search for it.
I would really like a /g/ option, where the instance admin can create multis for multiple !gaming instances under a single /g/gaming
This could help curate and avoid just any fedi !community tacking on for nefarious purposes, while allowing users to find all the good !communities under a single multi.
This is the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s going to result in a lot of duplicate posts (and the comments will still be fragmented). I’m following several technology communities and a lot of the posts are posted to each of these communities individually. This has always been my concern with federation (along with server health/durability)
It’s not the worst result, but I don’t know how well it will be received by more mainstream users. You also then have to solve discoverability of these “groups/metas”, and THAT has to be hosted on a federated instance so you could still end up with users confused on whether they should follow beehaws tech group or someone else’s….and round and round we go lol
(Just to be clear - I’m not against federation, it’s just such a starkly different model than the normal web that we really have to adjust our mindset and find truly novel solutions or adjust our expectations)
Good to see someone else thought of this feature. This would make the whole experience so much better.
Re: fragmentation
Also, this negative “fragmentation” view is biased. Before the subreddit migration, there were already existing and well-established communities in the fediverse. Suddenly, after the subreddit migration, it’s being called “fragmentation”.
For example, topics like Star Trek and Books. There are already large communities in the Fediverse before the related subreddits migrated. Yet, you will see people calling it “fragmented”, some even have the guts to call other communities to “merge” with the migrators.
This is wrong and very rude.
Having multiple communities is good. There is no one-size-fits-all. Also, we’ve been doing that in the entire history of the human race. That said, even if everyone merged into one mega church, it will still split up like it or not.
In other words, we need to stop viewing “fragmentation” as negative. In fact, don’t use that word. Don’t even think about it. Just setup your community and build it up. Create your own culture. Your own rules. System, team, and invite people who wants to join your type of community.
Multiple communities is healthy for everyone. It is a win for everyone.
And… haven’t we learned what happens when we rely on one service? One central platform?
A lot can happen.
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It suddenly goes offline. We’ve already experienced this in 2023. A lot of large communities disappeared for almost a week because the instance encountered issues.
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The instance owner might no longer have the resources to continue. Not necessarily on the financial side, remember, there is the technical side which will take an owner’s time.
Sure, they can get other admins to join. But, as an instance admin, would you easily trust access? Consider also the trust your users has given you in protecting their data and privacy.
There were instances who went offline because of that, and instead of transfering management to a new team, or selling their platform to someone, they chose to shut it down permanently because they value the data and privacy of their users.
So… if that instance that happens to be hosting a one-size-fits-all community goes offline…
Well…
- Or, it can very well be something uncontrollable. Server farm fire, raid, who knows.
But if we let people build their own communities spread across different instances, then we are building redundancy, continuation, and resiliency. If one goes down, for whatever reason, we have existing communities we can move into and continue our discussions, with minimal interference.
_
Well said, this was all something I didn’t really understand before reddit did what it did. It’s all crystal clear now though!
Good points and well written! Would give you gold if i could. The word fragmented in this context has positive connotations of resiliency, variety and freedom.
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If the choice is tolerating trolls and jerks vs. dealing with communities that are fragmented and harder to find, I’ll choose fragmentation every time.
I just wanna say what’s on my mind (trite though it may be) without all the pedantry, trolling, and hostility. I’m not a mean person IRL, I don’t put up with jerks IRL, and I want the same thing online. Everything else is a distant second. I like Beehaw.
By the same token, I support anyone who disagrees, and I encourage them to find an instance that’s a better match. I just want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable expressing themselves. I hope people find an instance that suits them; they shouldn’t feel like they need to change to suit the instance.
I think you got things the right way, however keep in mind that there isn’t any standard yet. There is indeed multiple communities for the same subjects on Reddit, you just have a principal one. Since things are pretty new on here you haven’t major subs emerging. It will eventually be the case I think !
That’s the point! If you look at Reddit and choose an argument, say for example “pc building subreddit”, you could find dozens of subreddit related to that topics. There are 1 or 2 that have the majority of good contents and users, but this happens over times.
Exactly: r/baseball and r/MLB, r/hockey and r/NHL, the 50 Linux subreddits, it goes on and on. Fragmentation is far from a fediverse innovation.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Fragmentation is good, as it means there are options for leaving a community behind. Fragmentation and competition are synonyms, and generally competition is good.
Lemmy definitely won’t kill reddit the same way mastodon won’t kill twitter, but I don’t want it to. I just want it them to be successful enough to be a viable alternative when someone like Spez or Elon think they don’t need to listen to their users.
I agree with what others are saying, it’s not different than people starting their own subreddits when they don’t like the main community anymore. But I also agree with you, a little bit of competition is good. It may be a little unconstructive at first while the user count is still small but eventually supporting a few communities on the same topic instead of just one will have it’s benefits.
This is how I feel. I’d rather have things be fragmented than be too big to fail. A lot of people have joked in the past few years that it feels like the internet only has 4 sites on it now; I’m pretty happy to be back to browsing multiple. It reminds me of following multiple forums around the same topics back in the day. Variety is the spice of life!
I’m also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I’m hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.
Also being able to point to lemmy and say “go here for a better experience” is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.
That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance’s community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.
Differences in an instance’s culture and moderation is one reason I’m not too worried about fragmentation. If anything, I think it’ll be for the better. Even if there’s a lot of overlap in purpose between communities from different instances, the administration, moderation, and lay users of the communities will lend differences to how things feel. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious, sometimes it’s going to be subtle. Either way, I’m in favor of having more options. I think it increases the odds of finding a place that feels just right.
Yes the devs need to work on the multireddit feature that reddit themselves abandoned.
I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.
Seriously, how many times have you heard Redditors complain that a community has gotten too toxic, or too meme-filled, or too obnoxious, or too (insert whatever adjective).
Guess what - on Lemmy, you and all the people that think that can start a new one, and you can moderate that stuff out. And the people that enjoy the existing community and its vibe can remain. And you can all like the same stuff while treating it differently. I’m all for the migration, but man I am getting burnt out on all the fresh rexxitors posting about how they don’t get or want to change lemmy after they’ve been here for like three days.
No i think they do get it, it’s exactly like how subreddits work, if you don’t like how /r/technology works, you can always create a new tech based subreddit moderated anyway you like. The issue isnt that there are multiple communities.
The problem, as always, is discoverability of all of these disjointed communities. I’m still new to Lemmy, but it seems like you have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them.
but it seems like you have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them
That’s a tool that exists and can be very helpful, but you can also browse all communities federated with your instance by just going to “Communities” and selecting “all”. You can search for anything that way. It’s not perfect and in desperate need of some filtering/sorting tools (coming in the future I believe), but you definitely don’t have to use a third party tool! Also works on Jerboa, not sure about the iOS app.
Thank you for the tip!
You’re welcome! Happy browsing. Another tip that will have mixed results is to ask for recs in the chat community (either Beehaw’s or other instances). It never ceases to amaze me how many random/niche communities there are that I’d never have thought to look for!
Change is hard and can be confusing. If the community remains open and helpful hopefully a real push can be made towards taking sites like Reddit down a few pegs.
Exactly; this puts alternatives out there! On Reddit, it takes lots of fed up people to set up a new sub should there be an unpopular new rule or power-tripping mods. If one instance has more ‘troll-adjacent’ users on a gaming community, I can just go somewhere else.
