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!)
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.
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.
This only seems to show communities that people have searched for by URL in the past, or communities that other users on the same server have subscribed to, or something like that. I have a Lemmy instance just for myself, and when I go to Communities then to All, it only shows communities I’ve subscribed to. I need to search for others by URL to be able to find them.
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!
There’s another one at https://lemmyverse.net/communities that I prefer more :)
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.