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?
On Reddit there can be multiple tech subs too, and I bet there are. Usually one of them just becomes dominant.
Yep I followed multiple subs with overlapping content, especially with technology, PC hardware, etc etc
There are 2 car-enthusiast subreddits. /r/autos and /r/cars. Years ago they were planning to merge because they were so similar. Some disagreement between the direction caused them to not merge and actually differentiate. Now /r/cars doesn’t allow image posts to foster more discussion while /autos can be more about looking at cool cars. I think similar things will happen to Lemmy
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”.
things are better on reddit because only a single community 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.
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 bob@google.com and bob@microsoft.com are two different “identifiers” and, most likely, two completely different people. Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” are different names
Given a bit of time, I think the understanding that “!foo@lemmy.ml” and “!foo@beehaw.org” 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances
Thankfully it looks like this sort of thing is already on the radar.
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.
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own “meta communities”.
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
This is the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s going to result in a lot of duplicate posts (and the comments will still be fragmented). I’m following several technology communities and a lot of the posts are posted to each of these communities individually. This has always been my concern with federation (along with server health/durability)
It’s not the worst result, but I don’t know how well it will be received by more mainstream users. You also then have to solve discoverability of these “groups/metas”, and THAT has to be hosted on a federated instance so you could still end up with users confused on whether they should follow beehaws tech group or someone else’s….and round and round we go lol
(Just to be clear - I’m not against federation, it’s just such a starkly different model than the normal web that we really have to adjust our mindset and find truly novel solutions or adjust our expectations)
This would be a huge plus, especially if it could be a server-wide multi. Instance maintainers could create /c/technology@instance.com but make it contain content from a curated list of other federated instances with their own /c/technology or lists could be distributed containing popular technology communities and you could import that list as your /c/technology as a personal multi.
Good to see someone else thought of this feature. This would make the whole experience so much better.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Fragmentation is good, as it means there are options for leaving a community behind. Fragmentation and competition are synonyms, and generally competition is good.
Lemmy definitely won’t kill reddit the same way mastodon won’t kill twitter, but I don’t want it to. I just want it them to be successful enough to be a viable alternative when someone like Spez or Elon think they don’t need to listen to their users.
This is how I feel. I’d rather have things be fragmented than be too big to fail. A lot of people have joked in the past few years that it feels like the internet only has 4 sites on it now; I’m pretty happy to be back to browsing multiple. It reminds me of following multiple forums around the same topics back in the day. Variety is the spice of life!
I’m also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I’m hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.
Also being able to point to lemmy and say “go here for a better experience” is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.
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. (please correct me if there is a better way I just haven’t found yet!)
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.
have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them.
There’s a better one at https://lemmyverse.net/communities :)
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.
I think you got things the right way, however keep in mind that there isn’t any standard yet. There is indeed multiple communities for the same subjects on Reddit, you just have a principal one. Since things are pretty new on here you haven’t major subs emerging. It will eventually be the case I think !
That’s the point! If you look at Reddit and choose an argument, say for example “pc building subreddit”, you could find dozens of subreddit related to that topics. There are 1 or 2 that have the majority of good contents and users, but this happens over times.
Re: fragmentation
Also, this negative “fragmentation” view is biased. Before the subreddit migration, there were already existing and well-established communities in the fediverse. Suddenly, after the subreddit migration, it’s being called “fragmentation”.
For example, topics like Star Trek and Books. There are already large communities in the Fediverse before the related subreddits migrated. Yet, you will see people calling it “fragmented”, some even have the guts to call other communities to “merge” with the migrators.
This is wrong and very rude.
Having multiple communities is good. There is no one-size-fits-all. Also, we’ve been doing that in the entire history of the human race. That said, even if everyone merged into one mega church, it will still split up like it or not.
In other words, we need to stop viewing “fragmentation” as negative. In fact, don’t use that word. Don’t even think about it. Just setup your community and build it up. Create your own culture. Your own rules. System, team, and invite people who wants to join your type of community.
Multiple communities is healthy for everyone. It is a win for everyone.
And… haven’t we learned what happens when we rely on one service? One central platform?
A lot can happen.
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It suddenly goes offline. We’ve already experienced this in 2023. A lot of large communities disappeared for almost a week because the instance encountered issues.
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The instance owner might no longer have the resources to continue. Not necessarily on the financial side, remember, there is the technical side which will take an owner’s time.
Sure, they can get other admins to join. But, as an instance admin, would you easily trust access? Consider also the trust your users has given you in protecting their data and privacy.
There were instances who went offline because of that, and instead of transfering management to a new team, or selling their platform to someone, they chose to shut it down permanently because they value the data and privacy of their users.
So… if that instance that happens to be hosting a one-size-fits-all community goes offline…
Well…
- Or, it can very well be something uncontrollable. Server farm fire, raid, who knows.
But if we let people build their own communities spread across different instances, then we are building redundancy, continuation, and resiliency. If one goes down, for whatever reason, we have existing communities we can move into and continue our discussions, with minimal interference.
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Well said, this was all something I didn’t really understand before reddit did what it did. It’s all crystal clear now though!
Good points and well written! Would give you gold if i could. The word fragmented in this context has positive connotations of resiliency, variety and freedom.
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That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance’s community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.
One feature suggestion for Lemmy someone made: Create something like a multi-subreddit with Lemmy groups .
I love the idea. Basically, you could toss all the fragemented tech topics into a single multi-subreddit, giving you the ability to browse through a single topic but spanning different Lemmy installations.
This is a good idea and doesn’t even sound very difficult for a clever person
This sounds like a great idea but I’m wondering if this is best to go into the UI of an app, for instance. Making the lists of multi-subreddits easily sharable would be a big plus, that way it isn’t just one person who controls who is allowed into the multi-subreddit.
Give it time. Big communities will form, and unlike Reddit, there will be more competition between them. You won’t just have one group of mods squatting over “Apple” or “Android” because they registered it first.
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.
Honestly, this is like “the old days” where there were lots of small forums across the web. The big difference now is that you can be a member on one of them and subscribe to others hosted elsewhere.
No, this is worse than the old days. Back in the old days, forums were centered around specific groups and interests. All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.
Instead of going back to the old days, what we got is a bunch of general discussion Internet forums.
No, there were and are huge forums which catered to pretty much everything. From chatting to dating, gardening, gaming, technology, motor trucks, all in one forum.
Reddit actually just tried to replicate these forums but with a less centralised approach, ironically, by allowing everyone and not just the forum admins to make a new category on the forum.
I think the problem is more that some people still struggle to understand how to find and subscribe to communities and magazines not on their instance.
What lemmy needs is a multi-Reddit style function where you can group communities into silos by your choosing
Here’s some threads I’m monitoring hoping it’s added.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1156
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. There needs to be easier ways to move between instances and communities, find communities and group them based on categories so it LOOKs and is parsable from a single pane of glass.
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!
Disagree. Look at the number of true or actual subreddits. Fragmentation allows for communities on the same topic to approach things differently. Like one can be a meme community and the other be a serious discussion.
Having more options is always a good thing and is frankly needed so we don’t setup another reddit situation where everything is one spot and if the people who control it change views we struggle to move.
Having options is good. The difference between /r/guitar and /r/guitars was insane because if the people in charge. But different strokes for different folks.
Yup totally agreed.
I am also starting to pick up on the fact that (I think) a large amount of users never really went beyond the front page or /r/all. So, sure there are “main” subs for specific topics, but there is a very, very niche world of communities behind it all as well, and to your point, purposeful fractures of communities. I saw it a lot with the game-specific subs, where you might have a sub for news about the game and general discussion, one for memes, one for pvp or competitive, one for lfg or clan recruitment, etc. - it’s a good thing.
That’s also the nice thing about federated content and instances in that no single instance needs to (or should imo) try to be everything to everyone and it gives everyone involved so much more flexibility. I also think that last part is what some folks are struggling with as well - when there isn’t a clear winner or “main” sub for <topic xyz>, but rather, quite a few options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities each with their own culture and vibe, it can certainly feel overwhelming. Reddit provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.
[edited for grammar]
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.
