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?
To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.
If you want one platform, that’s what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?
This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the “pain points” are made more clear.
One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.
Maybe platforms collapsing is a feature and not a defect. I moved from Digg to Reddit and felt no great loss that Digg no longer exists years later.
i think we’re going to have to tolerate this discomfort!