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!)
One feature that might help with this is something similar to multi-reddits, where users can categorize communities into their own "meta communities".
IMO, this would solve the problem, while keeping the benefits of being decentralized. I could go to my “Community Group” called “Tech”, I could see all the aggregated results of Beehaw’s, kbin’s, etc, tech Communities.
While I haven't spent time looking at kbin, isn't that essentially what it does with its 'magazines'? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.
Afaik „magazines“ are just Lemmys „communities“ or reddits „subreddits“
Oh, good to know. For some reason I was under the impression that there was something 'more' to a Kbin magazine compared to a subreddit or Lemmy community. I'm sure I read about it somewhere and was sort of surprised at how flexible it seemed – but I can't seem to find it now, so I may have imagined it!
Oh. I didn't really realize that. But in looking at a few Magazines I follow, I only see content from my kbin.social instance, not any other instance. It's also possible that what you're saying is the intended functionality of kbin, but it might not be working yet since it isn't a mission critical feature.