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
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.
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.
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.
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