I'm actually excited by the idea of smaller communities. After a certain threshold a popular sub becomes more difficult to interact with for me, and I've been finding refuge in smaller subs for quite a while now.
So far just about everything here has that feel to it
When I first starting shifting away from Reddit, I was nervous about whether I’d like having smaller communities. I’m definitely adapting more to it myself.
I remember coming to a similar realization with Discord servers. I started out with joining servers between friends and I figured that maybe I was missing out by not getting into some larger ones. I actively tried getting into a couple of servers that weren’t even all that big compared to some numbers I’ve heard before—the servers I’d try to get into were like, 3,000+ users typically?
The conversations always felt way too fast for me to get a word in, and it never felt like I had many chances to start conversations unless it was like 2am and most of the serve was asleep. Voice chat feels like I can’t even get my foot in the door. Server rules and policies paradoxically felt convoluted as well as nebulous. I make a solid attempt at integrating into the culture wherever I go, but I could never seem to do those servers right. I still stick around some of those servers now, but only because they play meaningful roles in communities I’m in.
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It feels radical to say, because I’m so used to equating Big Numbers and Lots of Content to being a healthy community, but maybe there really isn’t too much wrong with a smaller or slower community? I’m starting to realize those are the places I really enjoy, and that maybe I don’t give them enough credit. It takes more time for fresh content and talk to come in, but when it does, it feels meaningful and like I actually have a chance to be that someone who starts it in the first place. The moderation and culture feels much more in touch with the community there.
I hope Beehaw succeeds in whatever the community and its leadership wants it to be, but I hope that it holds on to its integrity and the philosophy it’s communicated so far, even if that means it leans toward a smaller feel. I think I kinda like that feel to it.
This adds up to a huge fragmentation across what was previously a single community.
this is how these things start - there will be fragmentation until one community takes over the majority of the users.
When I grew up I could call local telephones without the area code. Now I can't. I managed.
I think some of the difficulty right now is on the presentation side. It may not be as noticable of an issue if we had a way to aggregate and view posts from related communities in a single consolidated view. I'm hoping the tooling around this will improve over time.
the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.
so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.
Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.
I think you have got it slightly wrong. You're correct that you can't just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you're subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.
I think your concern is a common one, but what you're seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.
Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn't. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they'll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.
The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.
I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you're subbed to.
And you wont even see most of it if Beehaw keeps defederating
This was a temporary emergency measure, they're already talking to the admins of those instances to discuss when to federate again, had Lemmy had stronger federation and moderation tools already they would had done that already, Lemmy is still pretty new after all
I don't think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn't dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.
The problem isn't that there are a lot of communities serving the same interest. The problem is that it's hard to see all the communities so that you can pick one or more to join. Reddit had its default front page -- and later r/popular -- which aided in subreddit discovery. You can't get this across all Lemmy instances yet. The best you can do is view all the Lemmy communities in a big instance. This works somewhat well, because Lemmy lets you see how many users of an instance have subscribed to a remote community as well as a local one.
At Lemmy.ninja we have a community dedicated to community discovery to help assist in this process. Our thinking is that once you know a community exists and can see how active it is, you can join it (along with the other related communities) and test it out until you get a nice comfortable community list to function in.
Yes this is a good callout. Kbin/Lemmy need to get better about cross searching various instances. Build in the https://lemmyverse.net/ functionality without having to browse to another site.
Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.
I feel conflicted about fragmentation;
On the one side, pooling resources into one centralized community can be really good for finding and sharing helpful information.
On the other side, groupthink and conflict. Not sure I need to elaborate, we've all experienced it and we've all been guilty of it.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities (not affiliated, but I think it's the best discovery tool I've found so far)
Something like this should be integrated into every lemmy instance!
I use this one - https://browse.feddit.de/
.... they probably serve similar purpose?
I think the idea is that in the end only one will "survive". Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers, whilst technology@lemmy.ml has only 750 subscribers, and that's the second biggest (unless i got this totally wrong)
Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers
strange, it's showing me here 1609 subscribers here through kbin, or what I see are kbin users subscribed to technology on beehaw while you quote directly beehaw users?
Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:
It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like this:
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:
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.
You're using this type of platform wrong, not just these fedderated websites but Reddit as well. You should subscribe to ALL the communities you want to see and then browse your subscriptions as a whole. In that way it is no different than Reddit, there are just way more options for major communities like tech. Which, as I have been telling everyone I can the past week, is a feature not a bug. We want the freedom of choice. The best communities should grow organically and the ones that are subpar will wither. Eventually those stronger communities will make up the bulk of your subscriptions.
@jon_010 @technology this is the problem of having generalist instances aiming to replace everything that was on 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.
Sure, but what about r/AmazingTechnology, r/InsaneTechnology, r/AskTechnology, r/TechnologyProTips etc etc. You'd have to be subbed to all of those in order to see all technology posts. And you probably are, because there's no penalty in being subscribed to many subs.
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.
True. But in due time you'll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the "go to" community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We're still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their "own thing". Maybe that's fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).
And all posts from all of these communities are shown in your home feed, so it's not like you miss discussions. There's no penalty for subscribing to all of them.
The only "fragmentation" that could happen is if one instance decides to defederate the other instances. That effectively "locks" their content from everyone else. And that is a shame. But it happens sometimes. Because instances are their own thing aimed for their own particular audiences.
I've had the same thoughts. I'm new to this like a lot of others so there is a learning curve but I have the same fears you do, that I will miss much of what is out there because I don't know what is available. For example, do I have to be subscribed to the Technology community on every instance?
My biggest fear for Lemmy is that it is going to end up being walled-off silos. I think we are already seeing that in motion with Beehaw defederating lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I won't comment on whether that was the right move or not (leave that to wiser people than I) but ff that happens across the platform it could become horribly fractured.
Not sure what the future will bring but I am hopeful that new features will evolve as more people get involved.
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
Those are two different communities. The same as they would be on Reddit. Literally different names.
Communities are hosted on one a synced with others. So technology will be the same on all servers as long as they haven't defederated each other.
Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like "best gaming mouse kbin" via Google?
maybe they could add a feature where users can set their own meta communities, like a custom collection from all the various instances
But they are not "duplicates". !technology@slrpnk.net is about Solarpunk technology etc.
And even for "technology" communities on general purpose instances: the naming is completely arbitrary and also on Reddit there were always communities with overlapping thematic areas.
The problem is not that there are different communities with somewhat overlapping themes (which is absolutely unavoidable) but some strange sense of FOMO because they happen to be named similarly. But that is just a mind-set issue that is IMHO very un-healthy.
What you need to understand is that "lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit" is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other "reddits".
The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren't "the same one community split fragmented" they're separate communities.
so while I can post in here on technology@beehaw.org it's very much the case and obvious to me that it's separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our technology@kbin.social which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.
In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren't the same thing.
I know y'all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don't exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I'm in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn't help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.
tl;dr: they're different communities, not the same community split among instances.
edit: it's also worth noting that us kbinauts aren't even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.
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