I don't see how Lemmy will fill the gap of Reddit - it's resulting in fragmentation
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/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. 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!)
On Reddit you also have multiple subreddits on technology. Especially when Reddit was just starting out several people started technology subreddits. It is just that you only visited the one most popular with the most users and most content. Which built up over quite some time. I think it is weird to expect Lemmy instances to be exactly like Reddit is now, when you consider Reddit is 17(!) years old.
While there will be a few instances which are very niche because they get defederated from anyone else and they may have a technology community as well, for the bigger, federated instances there will be the one big technology community again.
Currently people all over the fediverse start new communities without checking if they already exist. This won’t go on indefinitely…
The fragmentation is not inherent to how Lemmy works - the exact same fragmentation can and does happen on Reddit. Just a random example:
https://imgur.com/inXBMMA
On Reddit, it usually works out in the end in one way or another. Either mods decide to team up and combine their communities, or the users just naturally pick one community as the "winner".
Give it time. Big communities will form, and unlike Reddit, there will be more competition between them. You won’t just have one group of mods squatting over “Apple” or “Android” because they registered it first.
The thing you getting wrong is if you go to /r/technology you are only seeing one subreddit on Reddit. It is not all Technology forums on the internet nor is it even all the Tech stuff on Reddit. You never see it all. The world is big, you never will. You just though you were because Reddit is well known, and the Technology sub-reddit is well known to you. You made a choice just to use that subreddit still and Reddit has no interest in federating with other sites. At least on the Fediverse you can see most things on the Fediverse if you choose.
Ah yes, /r/technology, the only technology subreddit on reddit. There certainly has never existed a https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/, or /
https://www.reddit.com/r/technewstoday/ or a bunch of more technology subreddits. No. Of course there ever only was /r/technology. No fragmentation whatsoever on reddit.
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.
Also, this negative “fragmentation” view is biased. Before the subreddit migration, there were already existing and well-established communities in the fediverse. Suddenly, after the subreddit migration, it's being called “fragmentation”.
For example, topics like Star Trek and Books. There are already large communities in the Fediverse before the related subreddits migrated. Yet, you will see people calling it “fragmented”, some even have the guts to call other communities to “merge” with the migrators.
This is wrong and very rude.
Having multiple communities is good. There is no one-size-fits-all. Also, we've been doing that in the entire history of the human race. That said, even if everyone merged into one mega church, it will still split up like it or not.
In other words, we need to stop viewing “fragmentation” as negative. In fact, don't use that word. Don't even think about it. Just setup your community and build it up. Create your own culture. Your own rules. System, team, and invite people who wants to join your type of community.
Multiple communities is healthy for everyone. It is a win for everyone.
And… haven't we learned what happens when we rely on one service? One central platform?
A lot can happen.
It suddenly goes offline. We've already experienced this in 2023. A lot of large communities disappeared for almost a week because the instance encountered issues.
The instance owner might no longer have the resources to continue. Not necessarily on the financial side, remember, there is the technical side which will take an owner's time.
Sure, they can get other admins to join. But, as an instance admin, would you easily trust access? Consider also the trust your users has given you in protecting their data and privacy.
There were instances who went offline because of that, and instead of transfering management to a new team, or selling their platform to someone, they chose to shut it down permanently because they value the data and privacy of their users.
So… if that instance that happens to be hosting a one-size-fits-all community goes offline…
Well…
Or, it can very well be something uncontrollable. Server farm fire, raid, who knows.
But if we let people build their own communities spread across different instances, then we are building redundancy, continuation, and resiliency. If one goes down, for whatever reason, we have existing communities we can move into and continue our discussions, with minimal interference.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Fragmentation is good, as it means there are options for leaving a community behind. Fragmentation and competition are synonyms, and generally competition is good.
Lemmy definitely won't kill reddit the same way mastodon won't kill twitter, but I don't want it to. I just want it them to be successful enough to be a viable alternative when someone like Spez or Elon think they don't need to listen to their users.
If the choice is tolerating trolls and jerks vs. dealing with communities that are fragmented and harder to find, I’ll choose fragmentation every time.
I just wanna say what’s on my mind (trite though it may be) without all the pedantry, trolling, and hostility. I’m not a mean person IRL, I don’t put up with jerks IRL, and I want the same thing online. Everything else is a distant second. I like Beehaw.
By the same token, I support anyone who disagrees, and I encourage them to find an instance that’s a better match. I just want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable expressing themselves. I hope people find an instance that suits them; they shouldn’t feel like they need to change to suit the instance.
I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.
Honestly, this is like "the old days" where there were lots of small forums across the web. The big difference now is that you can be a member on one of them and subscribe to others hosted elsewhere, and there are sites like lemmyverse.net to find them. We used to have to find forums ourselves, through word of mouth, search engines, etc.
There's still forums today, but not as many any more. IMO Lemmy/kbin are a great replacement for 'traditional' forum systems. Lemmy even has a theme that looks just like phpBB.
On Reddit, you also have r/memes and r/meme (and many other similar ones). I think there are r/woo(oooo)sh subs with between 2-6 os. But in both cases one has vastly more users than the other(s), and most people probably only know about the most popular one.
So yea, over time one of these tech communities on Lemmy will probably be much bigger than the others, and grow faster because it's the biggest and thus most attractive.
I think you got things the right way, however keep in mind that there isn't any standard yet. There is indeed multiple communities for the same subjects on Reddit, you just have a principal one. Since things are pretty new on here you haven't major subs emerging. It will eventually be the case I think !
That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance's community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.
Where your account is hosted and which communities you subscribe to doesn't have to overlap at all. For instance, I'm on VLemmy but almost all of my subbed communities are on Beehaw.
I also think it may be a feature rather than a bug to have multiple communities for each topic. Each individual community can build its own sense of identity, guidelines, and norms. I'm personally feeling refreshed by the smaller volume of posts and comments in a way that encourages me to engage. Reddit had become very passive for me due to the sheer size of everything.
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?
To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.
If you want one platform, that's what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?
This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the "pain points" are made more clear.
One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.
Overall it feels like the days of massively centralized social media are over. Twitter and Reddit won't disappear but the fragmentation has already happened. Maybe it will be for the better.
One feature suggestion for Lemmy someone made: Create something like a multi-subreddit with Lemmy groups .
I love the idea. Basically, you could toss all the fragemented tech topics into a single multi-subreddit, giving you the ability to browse through a single topic but spanning different Lemmy installations.
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.
I'm rather hoping third-party apps like Jerboa will be able to allow multiple logins at once and have the ability to merge the feeds into one presentation.
I've grabbed the same login name on multiple lemmy servers plus kbin, so my identity is really easy to keep track of at least.
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?
Yes basically. Eventually people will be able to go to the search bar, type "technology" and just click the top result which will be by far the most active. Same thing happened on Reddit, see /r/tech vs /r/technology
And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?
Not really, the fact that all of the de facto communities for topics will be distributed across several instances is already superior to reddit.
I would see solution in third party app where you subscribe to communities and if they share same name like Technology then app will merge them together and also remove duplicate posts
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.
I'm actually excited by the idea of smaller communities. After a certain threshold a popular sub becomes more difficult to interact with for me, and I've been finding refuge in smaller subs for quite a while now.
So far just about everything here has that feel to it
We've had Usenet, Forum, IIM, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, etc. etc. They've all kind of started out fragmented but over time people naturally built up their communities and figured out what worked.
Kbin and Lemmy aren't that much different from Usenet or Forums, its just the terminology that is messing people up.
On Usenet communities ended up getting split up because people just really liked to spin off sub groups so you start with comp.technology, then comp.technology.linux, comp.technology.linux.ubuntu etc etc etc.
Forums were always fragmented communities. I have ForumA with these threads and ForumB with these threads, ForumB will never see the posts from ForumA unless they go to that website to see them (and vice versa).
In the Fediverse, sure communities might end up fragmented because each instance has a @technology BUT the benefit is I am on InstanceA and you are on InstanceB and as long as we are federated you can see all of the content from my instance and i can see all the content from yours.
Now, that all being said... One feature I am pushing for to get added to kbin is something along the lines of a multi-subreddit. That way you can set up technology@lemmy.world technology@beehaw.org technology@kbin.social etc to be in this multi-subreddit so as a user you will only see posts from @technology Users don't want to mess with 50 different tech communities but if we had a multi-subreddit feature that blends them all together so it only appeared as @technology I think it would win a lot more people over.
I spun up my own kbin instance so I can hopefully start helping with the development of features (and to lessen the load for other instances). The two features I'm hankering for at the moment are API support so I can write some content aggregator bots and the multi-subbredit feature.
Anyways that is my rant? tedtalk™? Idk, hopefully all of that made sense to someone out there.
Disagree. Look at the number of true or actual subreddits. Fragmentation allows for communities on the same topic to approach things differently. Like one can be a meme community and the other be a serious discussion.
Having more options is always a good thing and is frankly needed so we don't setup another reddit situation where everything is one spot and if the people who control it change views we struggle to move.
Defederation was always going to be at risk when you have different user bases with different values interacting with each other.
Look at email. The standard is open, but servers won't process email from different domains because those domains are known to be spam only. I expect Lemmy is going to be similar.
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 think some of the difficulty right now is on the presentation side. It may not be as noticable of an issue if we had a way to aggregate and view posts from related communities in a single consolidated view. I'm hoping the tooling around this will improve over time.
The problem isn't that there are a lot of communities serving the same interest. The problem is that it's hard to see all the communities so that you can pick one or more to join. Reddit had its default front page -- and later r/popular -- which aided in subreddit discovery. You can't get this across all Lemmy instances yet. The best you can do is view all the Lemmy communities in a big instance. This works somewhat well, because Lemmy lets you see how many users of an instance have subscribed to a remote community as well as a local one.
At Lemmy.ninja we have a community dedicated to community discovery to help assist in this process. Our thinking is that once you know a community exists and can see how active it is, you can join it (along with the other related communities) and test it out until you get a nice comfortable community list to function in.
the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.
so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.
Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.
I think you have got it slightly wrong. You're correct that you can't just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you're subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.
I think your concern is a common one, but what you're seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.
Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn't. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they'll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.
The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.
I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you're subbed to.
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.
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.
I think the idea is that in the end only one will "survive". Technology on beehaw has almost 20k subscrubers, whilst technology@lemmy.ml has only 750 subscribers, and that's the second biggest (unless i got this totally wrong)
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.
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:
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)
a multi-reddit type feature (if it gets built?!) may help to combine communities across multiple instances into a single feed
this isn't unique to Lemmy - reddit has / had similar situations such as /r/tech and /r/technology
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!
Eventually Lemmy will be split up into two sides like Mastodon has; the side that wants to be fragmented, broken, and blocks almost every instance, and the free side, that talks with everyone.
The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.
The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.
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?
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.
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. Because instances are their own thing aimed for their own particular audiences.
What you need to understand is that "lemmy instances slrpnk, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw.org collectively are reddit" is not correct. The proper analogy is that beehaw.org alone is reddit. And then beehaw.org is linking up with other "reddits".
The technology communities in those different instances are their own thing. They aren't "the same one community split fragmented" they're separate communities.
so while I can post in here on technology@beehaw.org it's very much the case and obvious to me that it's separate from the magazines we have here on kbin. we have our technology@kbin.social which is our technology community. and this technology on beehaw simply happens to be another technology community that I can see and participate in.
In practice, what results is that people interested in these topics will generally subscribe to all of them if they want to see all of the content. but they aren't the same thing.
I know y'all here on beehaw have some pretty emphasized posting guidelines that simply don't exist elsewhere on the fediverse. as a result, whenever I'm in a beehaw community I make sure to not kick the hornets nest (sorry I couldn't help but make the pun). but on the communities here on kbin? yes I happily participate more comfortably.
tl;dr: they're different communities, not the same community split among instances.
edit: it's also worth noting that us kbinauts aren't even using lemmy, and neither are the mastodon users who sometimes participate in these threads.
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.
I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.
IMO this is just a temporary problem - as communities establish themselves one will eventually become dominant. E.g. /c/technology@beehaw.org might become the dominant technology community, while others die out or stay small.
Think about it - it's a feed forward system. If one community of a certain subject has more users, it will generate on average more content and therefore will attract more subscribers, thus generating even more content.
Bluesky is working on a fix. They have a global identity system where you can move all your data (posts, likes, followers, blocks) to another instance if you get banned. The only thing that changes is your handle.
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.
This software is so new, and it has lots of potential.
I can see someone building an extension that aggregates many versions of the same sublemmy into one feed seamlessly, and then the feature being added to the main lemmy code.
I just visit the top Lemmy instances, sort by local category, and follow the ones I like on each instance. It doesn't matter if I follow 4 different channels called !technology cause I'll just get them all in my feed. I'm following self hosting on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and I get posts from both. I couldn't care less where it comes from, as long as I'm following I'm good to go.
There are many sites and list of large Lemmy servers right now. Just check out beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, etc.
First since this is all relatively new there's a bit of a gold rush for starting communities, eventually a couple of major communities across instances will emerge for different topics and those will stick, this will make things a bit less impractical from the point of view of an average user.
Second is if we ever get functionality on lemmy to create the equivalent of a multireddit, where you can group as many communities as you want into a single curated view (either for yourself or shared to the instance) then this becomes a non-issue.
This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.
Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.
Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.
If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.
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 singles /c. Twitter does that similarly with its List feature.
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. 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 by the user through a browser extension. 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?