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!)

  • jarfil@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.