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/[email protected], /c/[email protected], 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!)
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.