As someone else said, Reddit will die a death of a thousand cuts. The big hits will be the 3rd party apps loss followed by the expected old.reddit.com loss. That said, the majority of users don’t use either of those. I’m seeing some general large site / social media fatigue combined with a lot of mentions of Discord. Given they’ve even got forum channels now, it seems Discord may be one of a few new smaller web forum options like we had in the late early 2000s with the start of software like vBulletin and phpBB. It’s not looking like the Digg to Reddit migration. It’s more the Usenet to web forums migration. Reddit is the Usenet 2.0. We’re now scattering and waiting for the Usenet 3.0 contenders before a new champion is crowned.

I’m going to say that Big Tech hasn’t devalued online services. They’ve always been devalued. In the days of BBSes, most had both paid and free options. The free users might get bumped when the board was busy but that was it. You were often still able to dial in at all times and do everything on the board.

Honestly, that concept just carried forward. Usenet access was simply part of your internet access payment to your ISP. Free to join. You just needed a free NTP app. Many web forums were the same - completely free to use and maybe there were some ads, donations, or whatnot to help fund the site. Some even used forums as loss leaders - Harmony Central had their main page along with forums. Ditto other sites like Something Awful and Bodybuilding.com.

Right now the short-term is a mix. The reality is that the major jumps have been to Discord, not other forums, or so it seems. Subreddits already have their own Discord servers in many cases and there’s a load of them on top of that. Beyond that, it seems a mixed bag of people trying to find a new home. Talks have varied outside of the Lemmy / Tildes mentions; Fark, Hacker News, City-Data, and various smaller forums.

Seems we’ll be split on to at least a few if not many disparate forums and sites to fill various needs.

I think changing the default view for content and communities would help. Branching off is one thing and there may be a valid reason for the split. However, I wonder how many current duplicates are accidental. The current setup for Lemmy is to view Local communities by default. An intentional creation of a separate community for a reason is one thing.

Fragmentation of the communities will probably end up happening with time but I don’t know that it’s best to have things fragment early on when communities and those identities are still, in some cases, in the early stages of development.

It depends on the subreddit as well. There are some where discussion is expected. /r/nbadiscussion versus /r/nba, for example. The former will get into some good discussions if there’s a player looking to be traded. On /r/nba, you’ll get a bit of that but you’ll also get a few dozen, “He gone,” comments.

I appreciate both at various times. I go into /r/nba specifically for the funny takes and will go to /r/nbadiscussion when I’m feeling like reading something more. That said, even /r/nba can get into some pretty impressive posts with stats, diagrams, and excellent breakdowns. It just depends on the day.

I think the funnier times are where you expect one thing and get another. I can go into /r/guitarcirclejerk expecting some light hearted shitposting and end up with a great discussion on one thing or another.

While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There’s the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.

This is my preference as well. It reduces confusion.

So you’d have one Raspberry Pi community rather than every server creating their own? That would seem easier for some new users coming onboard.

Yes, they’re separate. I agree that it feels fractured. You can join them all but they remain separate.

Right now one of the problems is that, at least on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the default view for the front page as well as the community list is Local. You have to switch to All to see everything. The main Lemmy page touts the federation but it’s less prominent once you’re actually looking at content.

I’d like to treat it like usenet. rec.roller-coasters is the same across usenet servers. Right now, each server might have its own. I can access all of them all, sure, but it feels fractured and splintered with, potentially, most users simply accessing their servers local community.

I’d like to see singular communities rather than community-per-server in the federation. If /c/NHL exists, it simply exists. Right now, each server has their own communities that other servers can also join in but you always know they’re separated.

You’d end up with having to go to a different community regardless. It would just mean using a new community name rather than the server+community federated name.

Currently if something like /c/technology goes rogue, you’d end up either joining c/technology@beehaw.org or someone creates /c/tech… or both. In tighter federation, /c/technology is toast so you move to /c/tech or something like that instead but there’s no option for a /c/technology@some-other-server. In some ways more limiting but it ends up easier for the end user.

Well, at least I’ve subbed to add one more to the list. I’ll go comment in the ‘favorite team’ thread to at least kick things off in that thread as well.

Looks like an NFL community has been created. Just need to get them going for the other sports as well.

It was mentioned on Reddit. I wanted to give it a try. I’m not in favor of losing old.reddit.com or RIF and, like many others, am looking for a new internet home.

That or what happens is that everyone goes with their local server’s version and the federation isn’t as heavily user. At present on lemmy.ml, you’re presented with Local by default and you have to actively switch to All to go outside the server. It seems a bit as if they’re selling the idea of federation while also not promoting the idea of federation once you’re logged in by having ‘All’ be the default view.

It’s a loose federation of communities. Each server has its own communities that are pushed out. Meaning you can end up with 20 different gaming communities as each one will list the server they’re part of. It’s not like usenet where the newsgroup name is the same regardless of what server you’re on.

Yeah, I was hoping the communities were more tightly federated. That is, the community name was simply the community name on all servers rather than having local vs All.

At least from what I’ve read, here’s some of the confusion.

Most of it seems to revolve around the federation being rather loose. You have to pick a server to join first and your ID exists there. Probably easy enough as most are either joining lemmy.ml or beehaw.org, at least from what I’m seeing of new users.

The second problem is in some community confusion and local vs All. Communities are per server then propagated out. That is, you can have /c/hockey on lemmy.ml and a separate /c/hockey on beehaw.org. You then have to select the specific community you want to join, meaning some will see it as /c/hockey and others will see it via the federation name. The federation isn’t simply hidden and behind the scenes more like IRC or usenet.

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I think the point is more that the federation is visible and confusing to your average end user.