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I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.

This premise, I feel is the wrong way to look at it. What you think what's makes Reddit great and what made reddit great to me are totally different. What each user wants or expects from a reddit alternative is something that ISN'T Reddit. If I wanted Reddit, I'd go back to Reddit.

From your post, I don't think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.

I think the "fragmentation" of the current fediverse is great, its no longer one massive hivemind of a single dominate discussion points. I think in the long term, many of these communities will grow and change to suit their respective audience and some will fall out of favor and that's okay.

I personally do NOT want a single technology community. It becomes boring and samey really fast as the same opinions are reiterated over and over. Focused unique communities will come around that will be my peak of this amazing system.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Well said, variety is the spice of life! Reddit became very samey over the years. The archive of info is fantastic but who's to say that cant happen on a federated platform? Things are new and rapidly changing right now, I have confidence that Lemmy and platforms like it will grow into their own and become better than the things it's replaced. Reddit was long overdue for some competition or correction, here it is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

plus it felt like a lot of stuff got curated and posted by super users around the big subreddits. it felt like there were like the same 20 peoples posts getting most of the attention. at least here theres the potential for more diverse view points and posts from different instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From your post, I don’t think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.

I was very much into Internet forums as a child and posted on quite a few. But I didn't go on any of the general discussion boards, I focused those on specific topics or niches. That is what's missing with the fediverse today. Everyone is trying to provide a Reddit alternative right now but forget what made Internet forums of old great - their singular focus on a particular topic, community, or subject.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of the forums I've used didn't focus on a single topic or subject. It was usually made up of people sharing a general interest, but there were always boards within each forum for either general discussion or more focused discussion on a particular topic like movies, games, art, philosophy, etc

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's fair. Everyone has a different way of doing things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know that they're forgetting it. Both types of forum exist here. There's plenty of general-purpose instances, but there's plenty of specific instances too. At a casual glance, maybe a third of the instances on the join-lemmy list? startrek.website is a Star Trek-focused instance. programming.dev is a programming-focused instance. lennygrad.ml is a marxism-focused instance. There's a wet shaving instance, there's a cyberpunk instance, there's a solarpunk instance, there's a magic: the gathering instance, there's a dungeons and dragons instance, there's a pathfinder instance, there's a science instance, there's a science & nature instance, there's SEVERAL furry instances, there's a general anime/manga instance and also instances for specific anime or manga, hell there's an instance just for butts.

If you want to join a focused instance and focus on that topic, just like old-style forums, that's already just a thing you can do. You don't have to take advantage of federation.