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!)

  • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
    52·
    2 years ago

    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”.

    • lovesickoyster@lemmy.oneEnglish
      12·
      2 years ago

      things are better on reddit because only a single community subreddit 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.

      • sunaurus@lemm.eeEnglish
        31·
        2 years ago

        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 difficulty understanding that e-mail addresses like [email protected] and [email protected] are two different “identifiers” and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think there will be a general understanding that “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are different names.

        • lovesickoyster@lemmy.oneEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” 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.

          • Spzi@lemmy.clickEnglish
            5·
            2 years ago

            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.

            • lovesickoyster@lemmy.oneEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              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.

              • lars@programming.devEnglish
                5·
                2 years ago

                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.

                • lovesickoyster@lemmy.oneEnglish
                  5·
                  2 years ago

                  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.

              • Spzi@lemmy.clickEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                That’s semantics. They all have the same or at least very similar content; that’s fragmentation.

                How does it improve the situation if instead of same names, people have to resort to name variations to point to the same content?

          • Elw@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            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.

          • MagicShel@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            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.

        • mars296@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          I think what they mean is that taking your example with blue protocol, that same thing can happen both within instances and between instances. I do think it will eventually sort itself out but will take longer.