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?
People lament fragmentation because they feel like they’re missing out on large fractions of posts on a given topic by not being in all of the various communities dedicated to that topic.
But they don’t lament not seeing 99.999% of comments on a big subreddit because there are an unmanageable number of them. Or missing out on 99.99% of posts because most never get up voted.
You only need a few hundred active people in a space to make it dynamic and busy. That number also makes it possible to have actually discussions about things with other people.
Really, it’s better for everyone involved to find the community on a topic that fits your own vibe, than to throw everyone together into one homogeneous cacophony.
can we pin this one? on big sub there are times I just give up on reply or typed but then delete and never submit cause it doesn’t make any sense. I’d argue that fediverse should probably auto split up so you are never so big that 1 community have over 10k “active” people. accounting people’s schedule and time zone, 10k active sub is a lot of people already and you probably won’t miss anything important in the world(say Technology or Games).
By active I mean people that actually do something, posts and comments. Up/down vote or just simple feed/link reader I don’t think that counts as active.