220
I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation
(self.technology)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
220 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37737 readers
45 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
Hopefully something like the "multireddit" system can be implemented so users can make custom groups of communities to view as a single feed.
This is probably one of the most needed user functions in the fediverse.
You could theoretically do that with accounts on different instances, and tailor each account to a specific list of magazines.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.