Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?
This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.
Maybe that’s a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub’s that the instance is aware of :)
Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology
Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO
This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.
Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers
Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
This premise on which your question is based isn’t actually true though. There’s
/r/technologyand also/r/tech. There’s/r/DnDand also/r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.I feel like what you’re observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a “winner” sub with more participation because… unless there’s a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.
Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries… and over time you’ll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.
