Of the people who say anything about it, there seems to be two mutually exclusive camps of people on Lemmy in regards to how it should be structured.
There’s those who want it to be a drop-in replacement for whatever platform they migrated from (Reddit, ususally), with everything cultured in one simple, easy-to-browse place where there’s enough activity to support diversity, just without the enshittification, even though the centralization they crave is exactly what invites the enshittification…
…and then there’s those who specifically want the site to stay fragmented, because that’s the whole point of federation, it keeps out all the riff raff, and prevents the platform from losing what makes it so great. But many of them complain about why it isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, despite the fact that the fragmentation of community is by far the single greatest barrier preventing the mass adoption they yearn for.
Each one seems to want a piece of what the other has.
To be fair, if Lemmy’s discoverability wasn’t trash you could probably have both. I would love to have a bunch of small instances that were focused on individual topics, like Star Trek or anime or knitting or gardening or whatever and just jump between them. It feels like that’s what federation was built for.
But because Lemmy is so small right now and discoverability is so bad it seems like almost every instance is either intentionally a tech / general purpose one or so adjacent it might as well be. As long as there’s just one community for that thing that people can find that would be great, but instead there are like 10 spread around 3 different instances and 8 of them are dead and 1 just bot reposts the subreddit - and it’s really hard to tell which is which. Like, if everything was actually on one instance at least you could just list everything.
It’s almost like the saying “the grass is greener” is a reoccurring human phenomenon, lol.
I personally like the idea of many instances, but it would be great if there were a way of doing something about communities that are attempting to fill the same niche. For example, there are 3-4 small-mid sized photography communities with very similar rules and moderation styles. Maybe the mods could agree to form an alliance and somehow federate posts and comments across the community? If something goes sideways they could always break off the community level federation.
Of the people who say anything about it, there seems to be two mutually exclusive camps of people on Lemmy in regards to how it should be structured.
There’s those who want it to be a drop-in replacement for whatever platform they migrated from (Reddit, ususally), with everything cultured in one simple, easy-to-browse place where there’s enough activity to support diversity, just without the enshittification, even though the centralization they crave is exactly what invites the enshittification…
…and then there’s those who specifically want the site to stay fragmented, because that’s the whole point of federation, it keeps out all the riff raff, and prevents the platform from losing what makes it so great. But many of them complain about why it isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, despite the fact that the fragmentation of community is by far the single greatest barrier preventing the mass adoption they yearn for.
Each one seems to want a piece of what the other has.
To be fair, if Lemmy’s discoverability wasn’t trash you could probably have both. I would love to have a bunch of small instances that were focused on individual topics, like Star Trek or anime or knitting or gardening or whatever and just jump between them. It feels like that’s what federation was built for.
But because Lemmy is so small right now and discoverability is so bad it seems like almost every instance is either intentionally a tech / general purpose one or so adjacent it might as well be. As long as there’s just one community for that thing that people can find that would be great, but instead there are like 10 spread around 3 different instances and 8 of them are dead and 1 just bot reposts the subreddit - and it’s really hard to tell which is which. Like, if everything was actually on one instance at least you could just list everything.
It’s almost like the saying “the grass is greener” is a reoccurring human phenomenon, lol.
I personally like the idea of many instances, but it would be great if there were a way of doing something about communities that are attempting to fill the same niche. For example, there are 3-4 small-mid sized photography communities with very similar rules and moderation styles. Maybe the mods could agree to form an alliance and somehow federate posts and comments across the community? If something goes sideways they could always break off the community level federation.