I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation

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?

0xtero,
0xtero avatar

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.

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

I think something we really need is a way to search all of the instances for communities/magazines/whatever. If I want to find the biggest technology community I want to be able to search through ALL of them. Currently I feel like I can only search kbin and lemmy. And while those are great, I feel like I'm missing a huge section of what's actually available

duringoverflow,

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).

while technically you're correct, what I see as different that I think needs improvement, is the discoverability. It is needed to somehow when I search for e.g. technology to also see the various federated "technology" communities. If I have to manually search for an instance, find the correct handle, then go search for this handle in my own instance and only after that to be able to subscribe, it adds a difficulty on the level that I may never manage to know about the existence of some other communities (magazines). Apart from that, I agree it is totally fine to just let them organically grow and it will sort itself out on which one I may want to participate more.

Heresy_generator,
Heresy_generator avatar

Hopefully something like the "multireddit" system can be implemented so users can make custom groups of communities to view as a single feed.

MeowdyPardner,
MeowdyPardner avatar

Looks like there's already a suggestion for something along those lines here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/65

Never bad to add your thumbs up to the issue to show it's wanted

IniNew,

You could theoretically do that with accounts on different instances, and tailor each account to a specific list of magazines.

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

This is basically already how the Subscribed feed works, at least on kbin. I feel like creating your own categories is just one extra step there

AnonymousLlama,
AnonymousLlama avatar

Yeah I think that was what OP was talking about. Subscribing to all these feeds and then going to a single URL (/technology) that acts like an group, getting all of the posts that are grouped by the various magazines they've subscribed to.

From a user stand point right now you have your home page feed (with everything in it) or you can go to your subscription page and select a subscription to see all the posts, having about view where you can see all your related content sounds super handy.

readbeanicecream,
readbeanicecream avatar

This is probably one of the most needed user functions in the fediverse.

FeenisBoobicus,

Agreed. Like the above poster mentioned, the same issue has existed on Reddit, but it's had much more time for "winners and losers" to emerge from the battle for members. I do have to say I still don't know how to search for communities here (I'm on Kbin), and it would be very convenient to be able to type "technology" or whatever and see a list of all named communities across all instances currently being federated with, and then have the option to aggregate them into a single feed.

Aesthesiaphilia,

Beehaw in particular is difficult to find the correct syntax to search on kbin. If you're signed into your kbin account, and you enter the url https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org you'll get to this community. Likewise, https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org is the beehaw science community, etc

As for finding communities in the first place, I just open a new tab and go to https://beehaw.org/communities

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

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.

Bucket_of_Truth,

Can I reply to beehaw posts from kbin?

Edit: It worked!

Skrounge,

I'm enjoying just working it all out too. Best thing to come from Reddit in a while.

aeternum,

Very well put. I'd like to add, that it's actually a good thing that the fediverse is "fragmented" because then the power vacuum that happened on reddit can't easily happen here.

masterspace,

That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.

End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.

nude,

Hard disagree.

Tiktok is popular. Its hold very little value to lots of people though. Same thing with twitter.

For me, reddits value was from its popularity amongst a certain demographic, which was largely the techies. At this point enough techies have come over to the fediverse that so far its meeting or exceeding the reddit itch.

Id rather a community of 10,000 people who are mostly tech driven than a community of 10,000,000 with 10,000 techy types. Popular reddit posts had thousands of the same played out comments and comment chains languishing at the bottom of threads. Popular threads on the fediverse so far have people engaging in conversation without a collapsed thread of 4000 ignored posts at the bottom.

Popularity means nothing when its mostly people with nothing worthwhile to say except the same played out jokes and memes

myke_tuna,
myke_tuna avatar

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Recently, I was subbed to overlapping sources on kbin and Lemmy and I realized I had to cut the fat. I see similar posts covering the same event in multiple places, but I'm not going to seriously engage in all of them.

Basically, I don't need to find the biggest one that has everything on it or create one mega aggregate, I just need to find the right place for me. Some people seem to want to be plugged into this 1 big nexus of every permutation of a topic, but I don't see a reason for it.

If you extend that thinking out to the internet as a whole, you'd need to be part of these forums and this subreddit and this Facebook group and these discords or you're gonna miss out on something. But most of it is just noise at a certain point.

Friend,
Friend avatar

Exactly. We do it in real life so why not online too. Variety is the spice of life!

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.

Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.

I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.

But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.

Aesthesiaphilia,

There's a sweet spot. A dead forum is of no use to anyone. Reddit had a good few years where there were enough users to have a good exchange of information, and not a sea of low effort posts. I think it all changed when they started advertising their app and "new reddit" on Facebook.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

Well, define "dead", because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.

People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.

Aesthesiaphilia,

because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead

Huh? No, I'd say the opposite, the fediverse is in the sweet spot right now.

LChitman,
LChitman avatar

Ugh, yes, it's unfortunate that popularity ruined so many subs. We've all watched a tonne of them turn into generic repost mills over the years.

effingjoe,
effingjoe avatar

I'm hoping (actually, expecting-- if we're being honest) that features are added to reddit-esque apps like lemmy and kbin that allow you to make personal groups of magazines/communities. This would very nearly solve the fragmentation "problem". Better yet if they add a way to share these personal groups to be imported by others.

Then we would get the benefits that come with decentralization, but without the detriments that come along with it.

Aesthesiaphilia,

  1. I love that "kbinauts" is gaining traction

  2. I wish kbin made it more obvious what instance a given thread in your feed is from. If it's from lemmy, I know I can post memes and I should be prepared for flame wars. If it's from beehaw, I know I can have a thoughtful and respectful conversation. I'm okay with either, but I don't want to accidentally write an essay on lemmy that no one will read, or pick a fight on beehaw with someone who had no ill intent.

If it's from kbin I know we'll spend some time talking about how great everything is and how we're all just stoked to be here 😁

VulcanSphere,
VulcanSphere avatar

A native support for distinguishable instance indicator will be awesome, in the meantime, you can use this userscript https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468612-kbin-enhancement-script

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

I feel like it's just me posting kbinauts everywhere lol. also I love your assessment on the different communities :)

macracanthorhynchus,

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.

Friend,
Friend avatar

I agree wholeheartedly with @macracanthorhynchus but I also have my own hypothesis about how things will evolve.

The special thing that Forums had that was mostly missing from the centralised reddit subs was the sense of intimacy within the community. Specifically to the extent that you would get to know some of the members despite the anonymity.

The Fediverse allows us to have the best of both worlds in this respect. You'll pay special attention to the communities you are fond of, while at the same time keeping an eye on the rest.

Anyway, that's just my half baked prediction, but I hope it comes true!

yuun,

Agreed!

People keep talking about the appeal of the megacommunities on Reddit, and I'm like... were they really that great? There was so much noise to sift through to get to anything real. Having decent discussions or building communities? Maybe if you're in a small niche subreddit, but otherwise no.

PenguinTD,

right? Like you see a top voted comment is full of BS and tried to point out the mistakes or debate/argue, on popular sub it's nearly impossible as your reply would be buried by other comments that ride the karma wave before you see it. So the best you can do is try to find the reply that maybe says what you want to upvote that and down vote other mindless drone or bots, then hope for the best.

Aesthesiaphilia,

The one great thing about mega communities with long histories is recommendations. I would go to r/movies and search through old "what's the best [x] movie" a LOT. Or in my city sub, "where's the best burger", etc

But yeah, I think the bad mostly outweighs the good.

Spzi,

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.

Yes, if. That assumes they all searched for (or even !discovered) all the distributed communities. This would be visible as all communities having the exact same subscriber count.

In practice, most users will only subscribe to one or two communities, and subscriber counts will vary wildly. In practice, there is fragmentation (though that's neither necessarily a bad thing nor is it meaningfully different from reddit).

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.

That's an important point and very relevant in the context of the migration from reddit (which would not have happened if spez had only power over one or some instances, not all), and the context of the recent defederation event.

I got the feeling we as a lemmy community should want our communities to be fragmented across many instances. Not sure if more than a handful gives any further advantages, but having only one significant community on one particular instance makes the whole of lemmy very dependent on the administration of that instance.

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.

That would be great! I also hope search and discovery will be improved.

ethane,

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.

Ideally yes, but for a more niche community, federation is slower and posts don't get pushed through. I can see a lot of confusion when someone creates a niche sub because they thought it didn't exist, when in reality it does, and they were just the first to search for it from their server.

nude,

Posts do get pushed through, its just been a period of heavily increased traffic the last week or so, and many instances have had to tame measures to stay online at all, which in many cases has broken or slowed down the propagation.

These are issues that will be resolved in time

Friend, (edited )
Friend avatar

Honestly I don't think it matters, because Ihis exact thing happened after I created m/dryherbvapes, just a few hours before m/vaporents and https://lemmy.world/c/vaporents were created. I added them to the sidebar, subscribe and join into discussion on all three.

As far as I am concerned there is room for different communities with their own vibes about the same subject on the Web. I mean it happens in real life so why not?

Anyway kbin has a feature where it recommends similar magazines so that will be a huge opportunity for cross pollination once everything gets indexed fully.

Edit: typo

roofuskit,
roofuskit avatar

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.

Kichae,

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.

PenguinTD,

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.

Lells,
Lells avatar

I'm not sure how Lemmy works, but over on kbin I can set up my magazine (collection of threads similar to a subreddit) to autofederate content based on certain tags. For example, I run the DwarfFortress magazine, and I have it set up to automatically federate content in the fediverse based on the existence of a tag. Now, I haven't seen that happen yet, so I'm not 100% if it works or not, but it looks like the option is potentially there.

ethane,

Oh how do you do that auto federation thing?

HeartyBeast,
HeartyBeast avatar

When you set up a magazine you have a section at the bottom of the 'magazine panel' (basically mod settings) where you can add . Articles in the fediverse with that tag automagically show up in the magazine*

*terms and conditions apply beta software may not always perfom as expected etc etc

Aesthesiaphilia,

Whoa, no way!

I need to go edit my community

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

it's not quite "auto federation". but if you create/moderate a magazine you can set "tags" in the magazine settings that will automatically pull in microblog posts from elsewhere on the fediverse.

sanjosanjo,

I'm posting this from kbin, so I don't know if you will see this, but I thought Magazine was a group set up by kbin (like a sub-reddit, with a specific name). Are you saying that a kbin Magazine is something I set up myself with my own collection of content?

HeartyBeast,
HeartyBeast avatar

Like subreddits, a magazine can be set up by anyone. Hell - even I set one up :)

Lells,
Lells avatar

No, you had it right the first time. I'm saying if you subscribe to a magazine, there's a good chance that magazine is autofederating content based on tags, so you are getting more from the magazine than just what is deliberately posted into that magazine.

pixelpusher220,

Hi! wasn't really a readittor but def used it for the stuff. How do I find your magazine here? just signed up here at readit.buzz and not seeing it either with the reg search or the magazine search itself.

Lells,
Lells avatar

@pixelpusher220 Hmm, I haven't ran into anybody using readit.buzz yet, but I'm willing to try to help you out! The first thing I would do is make sure that if there is an option for federation to turn it on. Maybe ask within the readit.buzz community how to do this. This is early days for a lot of the tools and instances springing up, so there are still kinks being worked out possibly as well there.

I know I can reference and link to my sub by referencing it as @DwarfFortress

@DwarfFortress@kbin.social

Maybe clicking on that above within readit.buzz will direct you to be able to subscribe?

In a pinch if you wanted to view the magazine directly, it is at https://kbin.social/m/DwarfFortress

ETA: The magazine names are usually case sensitive

pixelpusher220,

Much appreciated. My Federation setting is On but lists no instances so seemingly I'd guess that's a reasonable guess at the problem. Appreciate the heads up on case sensitivity. I guess readit.buzz is fairly small, which is ironic b/c it's run by @supernovae of the bigger Universeodon.com Masto site haha

pixelpusher220,

Got it. the Magazine page search doesn't find it but your full @DwarfFortress in the regular search does find it! Thank you!

Lells,
Lells avatar

@pixelpusher220 Awesome, glad I could help!

boomer,

Exactly. Federation was supposed to promote liberal progress but just ended up being highly moderated policing 🤷‍♂️

FVVS,

I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn’t matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I’ll just get them all in my feed. I’m following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn’t care less where it comes from, as long as I’m following I’m good to go.

There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.

lmaydev,

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.

cykablyatbot,

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.

gabo2007,

Where your account is hosted and which communities you subscribe to doesn't have to overlap at all. For instance, I'm on VLemmy but almost all of my subbed communities are on Beehaw.

I also think it may be a feature rather than a bug to have multiple communities for each topic. Each individual community can build its own sense of identity, guidelines, and norms. I'm personally feeling refreshed by the smaller volume of posts and comments in a way that encourages me to engage. Reddit had become very passive for me due to the sheer size of everything.

darmok,

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.

HobbitFoot,

Defederation was always going to be at risk when you have different user bases with different values interacting with each other.

Look at email. The standard is open, but servers won't process email from different domains because those domains are known to be spam only. I expect Lemmy is going to be similar.

Contend6248, (edited )

Email-server are even working with a whitelist, so even a more radical choice, just to keep every random user from spinning up their own servers and spamming everyone else without any limits.

Uniquitous,

I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?

DarkDarkHouse,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

You could even say it’s neither. Different communities can have different vibes and choice can be good (I’m sure at one point we will be able to define our own multi-communities as well). And Reddit has a similar setup where multiple subs for one topic can be created, so I don’t see it as really that different. It’ll probably coalesce together over time.

emmaviolets,

Overall it feels like the days of massively centralized social media are over. Twitter and Reddit won't disappear but the fragmentation has already happened. Maybe it will be for the better.

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