this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Technology
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My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called "Books" on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You'd have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.
Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I'm subscribed to the "Literature" community here. It's nice. But it's entirely disconnected from any of the "Books" communities on other instances. I'm not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there's a plan to eventually allow "MultiReddit" style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.
What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I'm not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.
I don’t think of that as a negative. It’s a different structure than Reddit.
Each instance would be a community in the cultural sense. All of the Lemmy communities within that instance would be a place for primarily the same instance users to gather. Each instance having its own cultural identity. Decentralized.
Agreed. The same thing needed some getting used to when I moved to Mastodon earlier this year, but eventually, you start thinking in “instances” without realizing. I don’t know if the general public will go through the same transition of getting used to the fediverse, but if they will (and I think it’d be a good thing if they do), then this kind of instance-based UX won’t be an intriguing novelty anymore.
Somebody pointed out that it's not dissimilar from the way email works, where someone with a gmail account can easily email someone with a yahoo account, and that everyone understands that well enough. It's presented a lot differently, so that regular users don't even have to think about it - if anything, they can just think of the snail mail metaphor to understand it - but maybe there's a way to simplify Lemmy onboarding too.
Definitely the email metaphor helped me at the time too.
I hope other instances give themselves mascots as Beehaw has done, and foster an internal sense of being a member of an instance rather than a generic Lemmy member. That is a future that seems promising.