Technology

We've had Usenet, Forum, IIM, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, etc. etc. They've all kind of started out fragmented but over time people naturally built up their communities and figured out what worked.

Kbin and Lemmy aren't that much different from Usenet or Forums, its just the terminology that is messing people up.

On Usenet communities ended up getting split up because people just really liked to spin off sub groups so you start with comp.technology, then comp.technology.linux, comp.technology.linux.ubuntu etc etc etc.

Forums were always fragmented communities. I have ForumA with these threads and ForumB with these threads, ForumB will never see the posts from ForumA unless they go to that website to see them (and vice versa).

In the Fediverse, sure communities might end up fragmented because each instance has a @technology BUT the benefit is I am on InstanceA and you are on InstanceB and as long as we are federated you can see all of the content from my instance and i can see all the content from yours.

Now, that all being said... One feature I am pushing for to get added to kbin is something along the lines of a multi-subreddit. That way you can set up [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] etc to be in this multi-subreddit so as a user you will only see posts from @technology Users don't want to mess with 50 different tech communities but if we had a multi-subreddit feature that blends them all together so it only appeared as @technology I think it would win a lot more people over.

I spun up my own kbin instance so I can hopefully start helping with the development of features (and to lessen the load for other instances). The two features I'm hankering for at the moment are API support so I can write some content aggregator bots and the multi-subbredit feature.

Anyways that is my rant? tedtalk™? Idk, hopefully all of that made sense to someone out there.

the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.

so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.

Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.

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.

it's fragmentated but that's how federation works

I would see solution in third party app where you subscribe to communities and if they share same name like Technology then app will merge them together and also remove duplicate posts

The problem isn't that there are a lot of communities serving the same interest. The problem is that it's hard to see all the communities so that you can pick one or more to join. Reddit had its default front page -- and later r/popular -- which aided in subreddit discovery. You can't get this across all Lemmy instances yet. The best you can do is view all the Lemmy communities in a big instance. This works somewhat well, because Lemmy lets you see how many users of an instance have subscribed to a remote community as well as a local one.

At Lemmy.ninja we have a community dedicated to community discovery to help assist in this process. Our thinking is that once you know a community exists and can see how active it is, you can join it (along with the other related communities) and test it out until you get a nice comfortable community list to function in.

I feel conflicted about fragmentation;

On the one side, pooling resources into one centralized community can be really good for finding and sharing helpful information.

On the other side, groupthink and conflict. Not sure I need to elaborate, we've all experienced it and we've all been guilty of it.

I think it's an early day sorta problem you are looking at. From the reddit point of view. r/technology just sorta became the default, but there are other tech news subs for sure.

Early reddit there were probably 100s of them and then everyone just found /r/technology and that's where you can get the most engagement.

I do think lemmy will need a way to create your own multi-community subs. So you can quickly click on your "tech" tree and see all the tech subs you've subscribed to.

behaw defederating though could cause issues, but I'd think over time that'll sort itself out as well.

End of the day people will settle into communities and eventually there will probably be a main tech place and that'll just be where you go. Just going to take some time for people to sort through it.

There are a lot of people on reddit that just post for karma or w/e reasons so we definitely have less content because we have less bots. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.. I'd also imagin eventually we'll have plenty of bots.

You're using this type of platform wrong, not just these fedderated websites but Reddit as well. You should subscribe to ALL the communities you want to see and then browse your subscriptions as a whole. In that way it is no different than Reddit, there are just way more options for major communities like tech. Which, as I have been telling everyone I can the past week, is a feature not a bug. We want the freedom of choice. The best communities should grow organically and the ones that are subpar will wither. Eventually those stronger communities will make up the bulk of your subscriptions.

Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.

I think the idea is that in the end only one will "survive". Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers, whilst [email protected] has only 750 subscribers, and that's the second biggest (unless i got this totally wrong)

I don't think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn't dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.

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?

Yes basically. Eventually people will be able to go to the search bar, type "technology" and just click the top result which will be by far the most active. Same thing happened on Reddit, see /r/tech vs /r/technology

And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?

Not really, the fact that all of the de facto communities for topics will be distributed across several instances is already superior to reddit.

maybe they could add a feature where users can set their own meta communities, like a custom collection from all the various instances

https://lemmyverse.net/communities (not affiliated, but I think it's the best discovery tool I've found so far)

Something like this should be integrated into every lemmy instance!

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.

Sure, but what about r/AmazingTechnology, r/InsaneTechnology, r/AskTechnology, r/TechnologyProTips etc etc. You'd have to be subbed to all of those in order to see all technology posts. And you probably are, because there's no penalty in being subscribed to many subs.

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.

True. But in due time you'll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the "go to" community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We're still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their "own thing". Maybe that's fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).

And all posts from all of these communities are shown in your home feed, so it's not like you miss discussions. There's no penalty for subscribing to all of them.

The only "fragmentation" that could happen is if one instance decides to defederate the other instances. That effectively "locks" their content from everyone else. And that is a shame. But it happens sometimes. Because instances are their own thing aimed for their own particular audiences.

Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:

1. We've lost our home, and we're early in a process trying to find a new one. Gradually over time we possibly gravitate towards a subset of communities in whatever instance that interests us (and it appears we can subscribe to communities in other instances, whilst remaining in whatever instance we want?! Awesome didn't know that)
2. a multi-reddit type feature (if it gets built?!) may help to combine communities across multiple instances into a single feed
3. this isn't unique to Lemmy - reddit has / had similar situations such as /r/tech and /r/technology
4. As the communities / instances mature, I think we're likely to start to see centralisation of communities gathering around a primary community.

It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!

Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like "best gaming mouse kbin" via Google?

@jon_010 @technology this is the problem of having generalist instances aiming to replace everything that was on Reddit.

When I grew up I could call local telephones without the area code. Now I can't. I managed.

IMO this is just a temporary problem - as communities establish themselves one will eventually become dominant. E.g. /c/[email protected] might become the dominant technology community, while others die out or stay small.