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/[email protected], /c/[email protected], 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?

EDIT: commented a reply here: https://beehaw.org/comment/288898. Thanks for the discussion helping me understand what this is (and isnt!)

  • Heresy_generator@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

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

    • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • IniNew@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

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

    • FeenisBoobicus@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.