Technology

Will the posts, comments, magazines, etc that we create be indexed by Google? Will we be able to one day do something like "best gaming mouse kbin" via Google?

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.

Sure, but what about r/AmazingTechnology, r/InsaneTechnology, r/AskTechnology, r/TechnologyProTips etc etc. You'd have to be subbed to all of those in order to see all technology posts. And you probably are, because there's no penalty in being subscribed to many subs.

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.

True. But in due time you'll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the "go to" community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We're still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their "own thing". Maybe that's fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).

And all posts from all of these communities are shown in your home feed, so it's not like you miss discussions. There's no penalty for subscribing to all of them.

The only "fragmentation" that could happen is if one instance decides to defederate the other instances. That effectively "locks" their content from everyone else. And that is a shame. But it happens sometimes.

I think it's an early day sorta problem you are looking at. From the reddit point of view. r/technology just sorta became the default, but there are other tech news subs for sure.

Early reddit there were probably 100s of them and then everyone just found /r/technology and that's where you can get the most engagement.

I do think lemmy will need a way to create your own multi-community subs. So you can quickly click on your "tech" tree and see all the tech subs you've subscribed to.

behaw defederating though could cause issues, but I'd think over time that'll sort itself out as well.

End of the day people will settle into communities and eventually there will probably be a main tech place and that'll just be where you go. Just going to take some time for people to sort through it.

There are a lot of people on reddit that just post for karma or w/e reasons so we definitely have less content because we have less bots. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.. I'd also imagin eventually we'll have plenty of bots.

You're using this type of platform wrong, not just these fedderated websites but Reddit as well. You should subscribe to ALL the communities you want to see and then browse your subscriptions as a whole. In that way it is no different than Reddit, there are just way more options for major communities like tech. Which, as I have been telling everyone I can the past week, is a feature not a bug. We want the freedom of choice. The best communities should grow organically and the ones that are subpar will wither. Eventually those stronger communities will make up the bulk of your subscriptions.

This adds up to a huge fragmentation across what was previously a single community.

Unfortunately you're right, fragmentation is inevitable when a community loses it's home. It's only been a few days since the blackout protest started, give it some time for the dust to settle. I expect only one or two of the new communities to really stay active for a prolonged time.

I don't think anything is necessarily wrong with fragmentation. What is wrong with smaller communities?
One problem with Reddit was that larger communities resulted in the lowest common denominator replies. And that dynamic got worse over time, to the point where real people began to sound like repetitive bots or meme-posting bots. Nothing wrong if you like that kind of community but it is nice to also have ones that are much better curated.
I particularly enjoyed the subs where I didn't dare post because I was obviously the most ignorant person there and most of the replies were informed and intelligent. r/Technology was the exact opposite of that.

People lament fragmentation because they feel like they're missing out on large fractions of posts on a given topic by not being in all of the various communities dedicated to that topic.

But they don't lament not seeing 99.999% of comments on a big subreddit because there are an unmanageable number of them. Or missing out on 99.99% of posts because most never get up voted.

You only need a few hundred active people in a space to make it dynamic and busy. That number also makes it possible to have actually discussions about things with other people.

Really, it's better for everyone involved to find the community on a topic that fits your own vibe, than to throw everyone together into one homogeneous cacophony.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities (not affiliated, but I think it's the best discovery tool I've found so far)

Something like this should be integrated into every lemmy instance!

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 feel conflicted about fragmentation;

On the one side, pooling resources into one centralized community can be really good for finding and sharing helpful information.

On the other side, groupthink and conflict. Not sure I need to elaborate, we've all experienced it and we've all been guilty of it.

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.

maybe they could add a feature where users can set their own meta communities, like a custom collection from all the various instances

It's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like this:

• Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
• Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct

By having multiple instances, you aren't bound by a single ToS or Code of Conduct, you can pick whatever instance you want that matches the content you want to post to a community.

For example, the same "Technology" community could be on:

• an instance directed to kids
• an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
• an instance that discusses weapons technology

Having the community limited to a single instance, would never allow the different discussions each combination of instance:topic would allow, even if the topic is technically the same in all cases.

Forcing communities from multiple instances to merge, would also break the ToS of some of them.

So the logical solution is for the user to decide which instance:communities they want to follow and participate in, respecting the particular ToS and Code of Conduct of each.

On Reddit, the r/Technology community needs to follow a single set of ToS and Code of a Conduct. If you try to discuss something that meets the topic but is not allowed, then you will get banned, possibly from all of Reddit.

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!

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.

You're right on that part. Federations works great with mastodon and its communities made of individuals directly interacting with each other's accounts.

But when it comes to interacting though communities already spread through instances, not only it makes it hard for people to follow all these duplicates, but it threatens the very principle of federation in a certain way. Because most people will eventually subscribe to the biggest community for each subject (tech, nature, photo), which often turns out to be hosted on the biggest instances...and that is centralization once again.

A solution could be for users to gather all the communities they subscribed to around topics. Then your feed would be a mix of these topics' groups and single /c. Twitter does that similarly with its List feature.

Ultimately this is a problem that's never going away until we replace URLs. The HTTP approach to find documents by URL, i.e. server/path, is fundamentally brittle. Doesn't matter how careful you are, doesn't matter how much best practice you follow, that URL is going to be dead in a few years. The problem is made worse by DNS, which in turn makes URLs expensive and expire.

There are approaches like IPFS, which uses content-based addressing (i.e. fancy file hashes), but that's note enough either, as it provide no good way to update a resource.

The best™ solution would be some kind of global blockchain thing that keeps record of what people publish, giving each document a unique id, hash, and some way to update that resource in a non-destructive way (i.e. the version history is preserved). Hosting itself would still need to be done by other parties, but a global log file that lists out all the stuff humans have published would make it much easier and reliable to mirror it.

The end result should be "Internet as globally distributed immutable data structure".

Bit frustrating that this whole problem isn't getting the attention it deserves.

Fragmentation is certainly a problem if you’re looking for Reddit-style cohesive communities, how much of a problem it is remains to be seen in my opinion. The risk with trying to do things the Reddit way is that one or two large instances become dominant and you’ve just got Reddit all over again.

One potential solution that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the concept of “meta communities” - collections of smaller related communities across the fediverse that can be subscribed to and interacted with as if they were one, sort of like multi-Reddits. Users could potentially vote on a smaller community being admitted into the meta community, or there could be some other requirement. It could even be done locally/on a per user basis through a browser extension or their account on their home instance. It’s not perfect but it’s maybe something to explore.

Alternatively we just get used to more compact communities again. Let’s be honest - do we really have to know everything, all of the time?

But they are not "duplicates". !technology@slrpnk.net is about Solarpunk technology etc.

And even for "technology" communities on general purpose instances: the naming is completely arbitrary and also on Reddit there were always communities with overlapping thematic areas.

The problem is not that there are different communities with somewhat overlapping themes (which is absolutely unavoidable) but some strange sense of FOMO because they happen to be named similarly. But that is just a mind-set issue that is IMHO very un-healthy.