I’m a fairly new users, but I feel that navigating around the fediverse is a bit cumbersome, maybe the wrong word for it. But there is a lack of overview in a way. I enjoy being on this server, but I also like to follow other communities. Lots of different topics, everything from cars to Linux to architecture.
Right now there are 10 (that I could find on browse.feddit.de) instances named Linux on different server. So the small number of Linux users using some fediverse instance is spread around over many servers. Coming from reddit, things were far from perfect over there, but there is only r/Linux. It’s a shame users are spread so thin all over the place.
I used Linux as an example, I’ve seen the same “problem” for other topics as well. Anyways, just my perspective as a new users. Hope this wasn’t too much of a rant, maybe we can look at this as an issue where the fediverse can improve.
I don’t see this as a problem at all. The internet has always been this way. If there was one singular Linux community in the Fediverse and you had to go there to discuss the topic, you’d just have Reddit. And Reddit already exists.
the centralization of people also was a more recent thing. I remember specialized smaller forums and websites used to be more popular when I was younger. hell even earlier with GeoCities people had their homepage and blogs.
and even with discord and twitter people had their own small groups that may seem “redundant”.
This isn’t a problem with decentralization but more a UI/UX issue with current Fediverse clients. We all need to remember all of them are in early stages of development. I full suspect new features and tools will start popping up in the coming months to assist in the overall usability.
It is a matter of perspective. The internet has many Linux communities. Reddit has many too. One always chooses. You never get it all.
What is true though is change is hard. I built up my Reddit community list over 5 years. Doing this again in a day is not easy.
Right now there are 10 (that I could find on browse.feddit.de) instances named Linux on different server
Over time one of them will have more activity than the other and attract more and more users, it will then be THE linux community on lemmy. Just give it time.
Niche communities will organically begin to congregate in one or two places in the fediverse over time. It won’t happen instantly. The same thing happened over at Reddit, but they’ve had almost 2 decades for it to happen, and communities are still fragmented there. Just look at r/gaming, r/games, r/pcgaming, etc. It’s no different on the fediverse, the only difference is that these communities might share a name. So instead of having r/gaming and r/games, you have two communities both named c/gaming.
For now, what I do is search for the community I’m interested (i.e. Linux in your example), take a look at the number of users subscribed to each option and pick the largest one as my main source. If I find the quality of that community to be lacking, I check out the other ones as well.
I’m enjoying the slow, early-stages feel so far. It feels like there is good potential here at Beehaw and I’ve seen way less “not nice” behavior here than I have on subreddits.
But yeah, I haven’t explored the other instances too much because I’m not quite sure how find communities I’m interested in without getting overloaded by things that I’m not interested in. It will just take time to figure out.
There are a couple of open issues in the Lemmy repo discussing this sort of thing:
So far it doesn’t look like a priority for the core developers, but you know, open source etc etc-
