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?
EDIT: commented a reply here: https://beehaw.org/comment/288898. Thanks for the discussion helping me understand what this is (and isnt!)
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.
I don’t know if you’re referring to me, but I’ve previously discussed this idea several times in similar posts’ comments.
I think we could implement it as a separate server software that generically allows aggregation of ActivityPub feeds under separate ActivityPub feeds.
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.
Oh now that you mention it, a sharable link would be a must. This would promote curated “Awesome…” repos/links.
It would be ideal if it were part of the fediverse naming convention. For example “/m/multi-subreddit-name/c/group1@domain1/c/group2@domain2/…”
It would allow full transparency, the ability to update / change it… places could even provide URL shorteners for it.
Edit 2: formatting (come’on Lemmy don’t let me down)