Honestly, I can see why some people find it annoying but in my experience so far it's been fine. Do a sweep on lemmyverse, sub to all the communities around a given topic, never really think about which one it actually came from when I see a post in my feed.

There are some quite niche topics that have been unnecessarily split, essentially just because people want to be in charge rather than joining forces, but that's people for you and railing about it isn't gonna get us anywhere. From an end-user pov, subscribing to multiple has been fine.

I strongly prefer it.

It's a much more organic reflection of older systems. It used to be that there were local newspapers, national ones, and international ones. I want the same thing with my memes. I want a place I go to see what the hot movies and games across the world, and another where discussions are mostly people in my geography or who share a common set of tastes with me.

This idea that the internet should flatten the world into one monoculture has been, in my opinion, both naive and destructive to a lot of tastes that don't align with the dominant tastemakers.

Reddit has multiple repeat communities too, they just have different names. Just to take one example, there's /r/Canada, which got taken over by right wing assholes, /r/metacanada for those same right wing assholes to go full mask off, /r/onguardforthee for the people who didn't want to put up with the right wing assholes... You get the picture.

The fact that there are multiple overlapping communities with similar purposes can be frustrating, but it also provides layers of redundancy, which is what the fediverse is all about. We've been learning a lot of object lessons recently about the problems of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Not really. I usually just check the subscriber count and pick the larger one. Unless if they’re about the same, then I’ll sub to both. Just means I’ll see more content. Might be a bit of overlap sometimes, but not always.

Why not subscribe to them all? Content will still appear on your home feed …

There were a bunch of subreddits I was subbed to on Reddit that were effectively the same thing, even if they had different names.

Once again, this is a feature, not a bug. Two different servers, two different communities, united by a common communication protocol. This is what separates Lemmy from other Reddit clones, and what made it thrive, unlike non-federated sites who are either splintered and languishing, or attracting an unsavory audience.

I'd like to point out what just happened to !android@lemmy.world.

It was closed and migrated to another instance explicitly to keep things from being "spread out".

It also happens that the instance it was moved to has extremely overbearing moderation that effectively prevents actual discussion. It's so "curated" that everything is segregated into hyper specific feeds, everything except "official" news is removed, and no one is contributing because of the overbearing rules (no questions, no memes, no "rants" i.e. don't make opinion posts).

It's controlled by the "experienced" moderation team from /r/Android, that subreddit that would get like one or two posts a day that weren't removed. It was strangled. We are supposed to defer to it this "experienced" team, hence why the lemmy.world instance has been locked. Now that instance sits pretty as having thousands of subscribers, and that will hurt the growth of smaller android groups because people gravitate towards the biggest ones and the second biggest one on lemmy.world is locked.

In essence, forced centralization. This is exactly what federation was supposed to prevent. Subverted in less than a two weeks since those communities formed.

I'm just curious, what is the harm in subscribing to both for a little bit? If you feel they post similar content you can always drop one of them. Or if one ends up 'winning' then the problem is solved.

I don't like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don't know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it's possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. "Cats" and it's shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.

What's more annoying to me is the few users spamming every instance non stop with "engagement" content. Like dang bro chill this isn't about karma.

I'm curious, what's your concern with subscribing to both? I had the same thought when I switched and then thought "is this just a knee jerk reaction? I can't think of a decent reason why it's that annoying when they both appear in my subs feed anyway"

I'm interested to hear why others might not like it as that might be what I'm thinking without realising.

The upside of this is that if you don't like how a particular community is being moderated, you can follow a different community about the same topic

To make matters worse, I'm on Beehaw, which has defederated from Lemmy.world, so I can't see the politics community on there even if I wanted to.

It's one thing having different instances, but quite another when users on one instance can't see the communities of another.

On the other hand, having two different communities does mean that people in my situation could still participate on one of those.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

Once this lands it'll be all the positives and none of the downsides, so, meh.

I found out quickly that the instance matters. California at exploding-heads is not the same thing as my California, and they won't be talking about fun hikes to do on the weekend over there.

It just feels like forums of old to me

This might have to come from the app developers. The app is the one pulling from different instances so they will have to be the one that combines things from all over into one feed

I don’t think it’s bad, every instance has slightly different moderation rules. Reddit also has multiple variations of one subreddit, like offmychest and trueoffmychest.

If one sucks we can just hop to the other one. I like it.

Remember lemmy is in it's infancy still compared to reddit. I imagine as lemmy grows certain communities will end up being the more populated ones, and they will kind of become the default. The downside is that that will take time, the upside is there is always an alternative if something goes wrong.

It's okay for general topics like politics, news, ecc but for specific ones is just a waste to have multiple communities. Eventually, with more people joining lemmy, only one community per topic will prevail, I hope.

Instances are like countries that have their own values and rules. For example, technology@beehaw.org will not be the same as technology@lemmy.world. Beehaw is a heavily moderated instance, while Lemmy.world is more “free”. What can be posted on technology@lemmy.world will not necessarily be the case on technology@beehaw.org.

Reddit had duped of everything too. I’d rather subscribe to both and move my thumb a quarter centimeter to scroll past a dupe. I can deal with that.

I expect most clients, including the official web client, to have "meta-community" support soon, which will include the ability to meta together communities with the same name on different instances.

Actually, I kind of like this aspect. I digress ... yes, there will just never be one !politics because this is the feature of the fediverse. The idea is that, should you get banned from a community for politely expressing even slight disagreement, there could be a community on a different instance for you to join or you could form your own . Sometimes mods can be heavy handed and the decentralized approach to Lemmy helps to lessen speech being stifled. Some people get some mod power and it goes to their head.

Yes it is. But that doesn’t mean we should congeal onto one. Instead I’d strongly prefer clients being able to merge multiple communities into one feed. That way, if a node “drops” (defederated, closes, technical issue etc) the congealation (I’d like that to be the word, please) would still survive.

Discovery services could then be built around popular congealations.

That is inherent with the decentralized nature of instances. Hopefully with all the new dev attention we'll get community grouping and account linking to make it a bit another. But if you don't like the power consolidation from centralized systems this is the solution, warts and all.

I like it.

One big problem with Reddit was that subreddits became personal fiefdoms of the mods that have captured them. If the same happens here, we can simply move to the same community in another server.

Fragmentation is good.