this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.
So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That's very limiting.
Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I guess I'm too dumb to still understand how the communities work. I am using kbin, and it seems like magazines are the equivalent of a sub-reddit? I subscribed to a couple, but I guess there are multiple of the same magazines which are about the same thing?
There are many instances ("servers") of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of "magazines" and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.
Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance "foo." Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance "bar" and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won't see it. The community is effectively split โ often into more than two parts.
This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit's. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn't intuitive to newcomers.
You pretty much have it. Magazines on kbin and communities on Lemmy (same thing, as I understand it) are subreddits to all intents and purposes. But there are multiple ones, or similar ones, broken out all across the fediverse (which for some reason Android voice dictation wants to spell "fetaverse"; that definitely has comical possibilities!).
If you're subscribed to one of those communities, you're not connected to any of the others. So the total number of people who are interested in that topic are all split out from each other across the fediverse into relatively small groups.
You could search out the equivalent groups across the Fediverse and subscribe to each of them. But those communities and users would still be all split apart from each other. Readers of books on lemmy.ml won't see or be able to respond to posts on books on Beehaw.org unless they all go and subscribe separately to that beehaw community. So basically the whole community of interest is fractured.
Now, perhaps one of those communities will come to dominate all the others just in terms of popularity, and everyone will end up joining that one. It's possible. But I'm not sure that most instances could handle that kind of traffic. The ideal solution would be some way to merge communities of similar interest, or link them, or something. But these are early days yet, so maybe that's something that will be accomplished later.
We're not going to see massive communities like there were on Reddit for a long time, if ever. There are advantages to that, but also some big disadvantages.