Technology

I've had the same thoughts. I'm new to this like a lot of others so there is a learning curve but I have the same fears you do, that I will miss much of what is out there because I don't know what is available. For example, do I have to be subscribed to the Technology community on every instance?

My biggest fear for Lemmy is that it is going to end up being walled-off silos. I think we are already seeing that in motion with Beehaw defederating lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I won't comment on whether that was the right move or not (leave that to wiser people than I) but ff that happens across the platform it could become horribly fractured.

Not sure what the future will bring but I am hopeful that new features will evolve as more people get involved.

Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:

1. We've lost our home, and we're early in a process trying to find a new one. Gradually over time we possibly gravitate towards a subset of communities in whatever instance that interests us (and it appears we can subscribe to communities in other instances, whilst remaining in whatever instance we want?! Awesome didn't know that)
2. a multi-reddit type feature (if it gets built?!) may help to combine communities across multiple instances into a single feed
3. this isn't unique to Lemmy - reddit has / had similar situations such as /r/tech and /r/technology
4. As the communities / instances mature, I think we're likely to start to see centralisation of communities gathering around a primary community.

It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!

Those are two different communities. The same as they would be on Reddit. Literally different names.

Communities are hosted on one a synced with others. So technology will be the same on all servers as long as they haven't defederated each other.

What you need to understand is that "lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit" is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other "reddits".

The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren't "the same one community split fragmented" they're separate communities.

so while I can post in here on technology@beehaw.org it's very much the case and obvious to me that it's separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our technology@kbin.social which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.

In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren't the same thing.

I know y'all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don't exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I'm in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn't help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.

tl;dr: they're different communities, not the same community split among instances.

edit: it's also worth noting that us kbinauts aren't even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.

I'm not sure how Lemmy works, but over on kbin I can set up my magazine (collection of threads similar to a subreddit) to autofederate content based on certain tags. For example, I run the DwarfFortress magazine, and I have it set up to automatically federate content in the fediverse based on the existence of a #dwarffortress tag. Now, I haven't seen that happen yet, so I'm not 100% if it works or not, but it looks like the option is potentially there.

It's my 2nd day here. I love fediverse. Imagine that i write to you from mastodon. This thing have a lot of potential.

We are integrated and fragmented at the same time. Mind-blowing but i love this.

It's like writing from twitter to reddit user, this is insane. <3

Right now it might be a problem, but in the long term the communitys work it out themselves, reddit also had 10 different (general) memes subreddits.

As long as the instances are federated you can find their communitys pretty easily and participate there

There's 2 things to consider.

First since this is all relatively new there's a bit of a gold rush for starting communities, eventually a couple of major communities across instances will emerge for different topics and those will stick, this will make things a bit less impractical from the point of view of an average user.

Second is if we ever get functionality on lemmy to create the equivalent of a multireddit, where you can group as many communities as you want into a single curated view (either for yourself or shared to the instance) then this becomes a non-issue.

I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.

This software is so new, and it has lots of potential.

I can see someone building an extension that aggregates many versions of the same sublemmy into one feed seamlessly, and then the feature being added to the main lemmy code.

This will evolve and improve the more we use it.

This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.

Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.

Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.

If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.

To me this fragmentation is one of the strongest suits. Instead of putting everyone who is interesting in technology together, (which is an very large group of people), you can subdivide people. Take AI/LLMs for example. There's a group of people who is really interested by them and tries to use these technologies as much as possible. Theres also a group of people who is very critical of the harms and negative side effects of LLMs. Instead of mashing them together in a single community, both can now discuss the same news from their own standpoint.

And no, I'm not concerned about filter bubbles. I think the problem is the opposite, the idea that we have to force people in the same space who do not want to be together in the same space. Just like we dont do that in real life, people should gather around with the people they want to be with.