People need to realize you can use alternatives
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I've seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Good thing this is pretty pointless, since I can have the same community name in another instance.
I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.
(Wish I had the !remindme bot right now)
Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.
The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.
New subs were being made to recapture giant subs' original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.
Lemmy isn't big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.
I'm personally kind of hoping that the existence of smaller instances and multiple same-niche communities on Lemmy provides a way to avoid that phenomenon. Like, it'll probably happen to communities on the Big Instances, I imagine, but on the more limited ones... maybe not?
I like how Beehaw is doing it. Slowly introducing new servers as there is demand for it.
I also like the beehaw has a mission for community in mind, supported by having an application process; and their having prepared umbrella communities that will prevent echo chambers.
Beehaw is definitely getting hammered too though; it's probably the second- or third-largest instance atm.
Beehaw is most definitely an echo chamber.