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Dealing with duplicate communities?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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I get it but I worry it'll limit the success of Lemmy. Reddit's drawcard was finding THE sub for a topic, if the same discussion is fractured across many different indistinguishable ones it'll be like a bunch of random small chat groups which is something that already exists. Also means that maybe you'll be subbed to the "fediverse" sub that sucks and not realise there's a more established one you don't know about.
When I moved to Korea 3 years ago then I found r/korea and after a year or something I've been banned from posting and commenting there after my 2nd post because of some technicality (posted a link to my a video on my own peertube instance instead of a 3rd party like YouTube). A later found out there was a r/living-in-korea one which anyway fit much better and I was able to post and comment there.
So in my mind having several is much better than having one.
What would be nice is some UI to group and view them together as a user though.
IMO Reddit's drawcard was containing the sub, and therefore the community, for a topic. Reddit is where the discussion was, and for many communities still is. Rather than hosting a dedicated forum, people interested in starting a community can just start it and begin moderating and discussing without setting up a backend; it allows users to get to the "socializing" step of building a community in less steps. Lemmy also does this, albeit with a smaller community likely distributed over several instances and earlier in the system's lifecycle.
Hopefully, Lemmy will implement a "multi-community" option like the multireddit concept so that users can group multiple related communities into one feed.
That being said, I think that similar communities ought to find each other and work together to best serve the people of their communities. Some communities will benefit from collaborative non-competition (for example, a community for discussion about how to use a specific complex product) while some have no need to be centralized (for example, a community for sharing dank memes). However, even in communities that would benefit from non-competition in good times, users should always be free to form their own communities in case the parent community (or their moderation) becomes too odious to bear. This process was much more difficult on Reddit because sub names had to be unique, so new communities would need to pick a weird name.
the activity pub protocol is the thing that will limit the success of lemmy