I notice that when I search for communities I see the same community has been created on multiple instances. I could subscribe to all of them but I’d much rather it be one larger community. Does any else see this as an issue or find this frustrating? If so, have you done anything that’s made it easier to deal with or have any ideas of how it could be improved in the future?
Personally, I’d love to see all the content merged and have the instance tagged on the post, similar to using flair on Reddit.
I think we’d see better adoption of the fediverse and Lemmy if this could be fixed because the largest complaint I see is the lack of content. There’s a lot of content here, it’s just spread across multiple instances. Just my two cents though…
It would be nice to have clients that could merge several communities for convenience, but ultimately I don’t think this is that big of a problem. People will generally gravitate towards the largest community and that will take over as the default. And even on Reddit there would still be splinter communities for people who didn’t like the direction of the main community, sometimes even overtaking the old subreddit
No.
There’s no need for monoculture - especially on a platform that aims to be decentralised.
Look at it this way - if some town has three gay bars, three metal pubs and three old-man real-ale pubs, it’s not an issue for the LGBT community, the metal community or the drunk old men; they’re just different places to drink. Possibly the drunk gay old metal fans might get confused, but they sound awesome and are likely welcome everywhere.
…actually, thinking about it, I bet the drunk old men probably do have an issue with all eight of the other pubs they don’t go to. But that’s just them.
The drunk old men understand that the more bars there are, the harder it is for their wives to find them.
There are a number of factors that will lead to duplication of communities:
- Folks want their own version of a community, it wasn’t unusual. to have subreddits with overlapping subjects either. Folks may simply want a different focus or a different vibe, or maybe one of them is full of bigots, like what blew up with Battletech right before the APIpocalypse
- Defederation: Currently, Beehaw, a large and well-established instance that hosts some of the most popular communities, is defederated with at least two other large instances, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. due to issues with moderation load due to trolls and spammers abusing open signups. Folks on those servers cannot access the communities on Beehaw, and will probably have either created new ones or switched to other existing duplicate communities. Defederation is a fact of life in the fediverse, and that won’t be the last big one on Lemmy.
- Inconsistent federation: Even among instances that are not formally defederated, federation is not actually that reliable. If some communities are located on instances that don’t sync reliably with others, then posts there may not get seen, which may result in those groups either not being found on searches or being incorrectly judged as inactive by users searching for the topic. I think this is especially the case when talking about federation between lemmy instances and kbin instances.
Of those, the last is hopefully one where we can actually get a technical fix and make it go away, the first two are things that we’re going to be living with. Many have proposed a “multireddit” style mechanism for grouping related communities together, and I think that would be really nice.
In practice, it’s mostly not that big a deal to me except in cases where everybody’s posting the same thing to all the different communities at once. That can get a little confusing.
