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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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I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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/[email protected], /c/[email protected], 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!)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

How is that different than just a URL pointing to that video

The issue is that URLs don't point to videos, they point to servers. What that server returns in response to an URL query is arbitrary. Might be a video today, could be a different video tomorrow, or a completely different website all together since the domain switched owners. Almost all URLs break over the course of a couple of years.

By using content-addressing (i.e. Merkel tree, SHA256, etc.) you are able to link to the video itself. It doesn't matter if the server changes owner, your link will still point to that exact video. This does not automatically allow you to download the video of course, since the original server is still gone, but it allows you to ask others if they have a copy of that video and it allows you to verify that they returned the exact video you were looking for.

The blockchain or DHT, or whatever it might be in the end, would be used to organize the content-addresses and allow you to ask others for that video automatically. Or allow them to discover that new videos have been published. It would also provide some censorship resistance/transparency, since at the moment deleted content often just silently disappears, without any hint that it ever existed. A blockchain would keep record of what was there and why it was deleted.