Technology

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!

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.

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.