If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.
Exactly. I was subbed to both meirl and me_irl without issue
To be fair they are very different subs
Eh, I guess I was just a casual viewer bc it all seemed the same to me. Never went to the comments
‘Stop asking this’ is not a really helpful thing to say. We have a lot of new users, including myself, and everybody is figuring out how Lemmy works. Redundant questions will occur and lets answer those in a respectful manner.
Reddit does not have the problem in the exact same way. To have to articulate the nuance would be exhausting and clearly not productive. Please continue to ask that question until this community has a valid answer.
Thanks for your answer with zero contribution. Reddit and lemmy may not have the problem in the exact same way, but they are effectively the same. Whether it’s r/technology vs. r/tech or technology@lemmy.ml vs. technology@lemmy.world doesn’t matter to normal users.
I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance
Yes, limit instances to X number of communities. Forces people to use the search function properly, stops the large instances having all the communities, also has the positive effect of the user base spreading out rather than congregating on one or two big communities.
Yea, it’s an endless debate lately.
Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it’s possible the small clones will be left behind.
Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.
The most effective solution is to search for existing communities on federated instances before creating a new one on your instance. Then new communities are ideally only made if the existing community doesn’t meet your particular need or specific interest (eg. UnitedKingdom vs UKCasual), or if your instance doesn’t federate with the main community.
The same dispersion of userbase is present on reddit but the more popular urls/content will eventually become clear and less popular communities will either aggregate into the main one or become more niche (eg r/games vs r/gaming).
I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.
it matters a lot. if something is happening you want a quick overview of big discussion and not jump between a bunch of 10 small discussion rooms.
Reddit also has a bunch of homogeneous subs. Not a problem.
I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.
Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.
Lemme give my case.
I see what you did there.
Didn’t intend to do that, but hey…
