Technology

You're right on that part. Federations works great with mastodon and its instances 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.

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.

Ultimately this is a problem that's never going away until we replace URLs. The HTTP approach to find documents by URL, i.e. server/path, is fundamentally brittle. Doesn't matter how careful you are, doesn't matter how much best practice you follow, that URL is going to be dead in a few years. The problem is made worse by DNS, which in turn makes URLs expensive and expire.

There are approaches like IPFS, which uses content-based addressing (i.e. fancy file hashes), but that's note enough either, as it provide no good way to update a resource.

The best™ solution would be some kind of global blockchain thing that keeps record of what people publish, giving each document a unique id, hash, and some way to update that resource in a non-destructive way (i.e. the version history is preserved). Hosting itself would still need to be done by other parties, but a global log file that lists out all the stuff humans have published would make it much easier and reliable to mirror it.

The end result should be "Internet as globally distributed immutable data structure".

Bit frustrating that this whole problem isn't getting the attention it deserves.

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, sort of like multi-Reddits. 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?