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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess the real question here is: is this a bad thing, or just a different thing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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”.

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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.

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.