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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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.
Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community's values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.
Very well put. I'd like to add, that it's actually a good thing that the fediverse is "fragmented" because then the power vacuum that happened on reddit can't easily happen here.
That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.
End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.
I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.
But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.
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.
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.
I think that's just uniquely a beehaw thing. it's what results when you have a small number of moderators and a desire for a strict way of engaging and moderating. other instances naturally will grow faster and it'll be overwhelming, leading to defederation. I think many instances don't have this philosophy, so they're not exactly going to defederate each other.
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.
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/[email protected] 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.
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.
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:
It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!