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.
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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
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
I don't think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.
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.
IMO this is just a temporary problem - as communities establish themselves one will eventually become dominant. E.g. /c/technology@beehaw.org might become the dominant technology community, while others die out or stay small.
Think about it - it's a feed forward system. If one community of a certain subject has more users, it will generate on average more content and therefore will attract more subscribers, thus generating even more content.
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 hoping (actually, expecting-- if we're being honest) that features are added to reddit-esque apps like lemmy and kbin that allow you to make personal groups of magazines/communities. This would very nearly solve the fragmentation "problem". Better yet if they add a way to share these personal groups to be imported by others.
Then we would get the benefits that come with decentralization, but without the detriments that come along with it.
I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn't matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I'll just get them all in my feed. I'm following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn't care less where it comes from, as long as I'm following I'm good to go.
There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.