Isn’t it a bit of an annoying having repeat communities across various Lemmy instances?

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.

TMW you realize there's no downside to joining multiple communities for the same topic, even if they have the same name.
- Imo there is, but it's solvable. Personally, I almost always browse specific communities/subs and almost never scroll through my home feed. So multiple communities is annoying because it means jumping between each one on the list. Could be solved though, by just implementing a Lemmy equivalent to multireddits.
- Yeah it's natural to be a bit wary I think just because we're not used to things working that way. Took me a little bit as well but I've been here for over a month now so settled into it nicely.
From a different end-user POV, seeing the same stuff repeated is not fun. I would prefer to see everything once instead of choosing between seeing almost everything twice(subscribed to both) or missing a little bit(subscribed to one, blocked the other).
- The comments will be different between the two posts though
- Oh that's interesting, I wonder why I've not been seeing repeated posts. Maybe a setting somewhere, or a version difference, or we use different interfaces or whatever. Yeah I can definitely see how that would be annoying!
This is why the decentralized approach is great. If mods get their heads too power swollen, one can form their own community and even on their own server if they wish. The approach lessens the potential for abuse.
- Totally agree - it's a wonderful freedom, but it also means as happened with Android recently that a large community can be closed down and redirected and there isn't a policy to transfer or reclaim the space if it is locked by the one person who owns it. Not a huge issue now, but come the point large companies are moving to the space it could well get quite messy!
Seems like this is probably the answer. We don’t need to not looking for a 1 to 1 replacement for Reddit and the variation we see in communities could end up bringing some vibrancy and more differing opinions on things around here.
- To be fair, this often happened on Reddit as well. I was subscribed to 6 virtual reality subs, and at least that many 3d printing.
  
  One issue I’ve found with this model is that content is being cross posted pretty heavily, meaning I’ll see the same post by the same person 5 times in the matter of a few minutes.
  
  I’m trying to keep in mind that it’s still early, and communities are still finding their way. The ones that form an identity will have a larger base, and will become the de facto place that posts are made.
- I don't see this as a "bug" of Lemmy but a feature. What if mods get heavy handed because they feel 'insulted' and ban somebody simply out of spite. This gives the ability of somebody to form their own community of the same name on a different server without stifling speech. I sincerely hope that this does not get 'fixed.'
- It's come in clutch a couple times as well when one instance is having federation issues, but I still get to see other content coming from a community on another one. There's definitely downsides though, no argument there.
Exactly. And if one of them ends up sucking for any reason, you can drop it and be very glad that there were several. That’s very much the point.

I want to make sure people have a good experience here, but on this one, I really don’t get what people find so difficult about it…
This right here is the correct answer. Almost immediately you realize it doesn't matter.

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.

I couldn't have said it better myself.
When I look at the many communities with the same names, I completely stops me from interacting with them. Most of the time I know they’re going to be copies of each other with a bunch of duplicate content reposted to infinity.

I think your example is interesting but i disagree with your assertion that it some how facilitates finding niche content.

For example it would be difficult to have to explicitly know that obscure-instance.xyz/c/games hosts content about 90’s graphic adventure games from the Netherlands and programming.dev/c/games is actually about game design and not games generally. A better way, IMO, is to just name your community what it is. Names likeadventure_games_nl and game_design offer a significantly better user experience. If we want to make the fediverse feel accessible to people, it has to be easy to find what you’re looking for.

This whole thing feels like crypto where everyone has their own coin and they only kind of work together if you have some kind of exchange and some people accept Bitcoin and not Doge. It’s just too complicated for non technical people.
- First, if it helps, redundant communities will solve themselves. We're in a period where people are trying stuff out, but if one group is just a weaker duplicate of another, everyone will eventually just coalesce around the slightly better version.
  
  As for the general complaint, I can see your rationale. But I think a better analogy instead of cryptocoins -- which were all essentially useless ponzi schemes and ego projects -- would be bars.
  
  In theory, you don't need two (or more!) sports bars on the same block. But there's a reason they stay in business instead of one owner just expanding to serve twice as many customers. They have different vibes based on different people. One might dig soccer more, or have a better selection of craft brews. Even though they're superficially similar, if you ask your friend, "Hey, do you want to go to X?" It's not at all weird for them to say, "Eh... let's to Y. if you want, we can stop by X later."
  
  You know what I mean?

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.

There is currently a pending feature request to add a feature dubbed “multireddit” that communities can add themselves to and where the end user would only have to sub to one multireddit to have access to all the communities with the same on multiple servers. It seems to be opt-in for communities, though, which is good IMO.
- This sounds like a great idea; all the benefits and there's no obvious downside.
- Lol, thanks for sharing that. I came up with this concept myself when I thought about how you could fix this issue while also allowing servers to have duplicates of existing communities on other servers. I hope it will be implemented in the near feature.

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.

And if everyone does that, eventually there will be a main community that emerges and the other ones die.
- Exactly why federated social medias instances aren't necessarily a solution to centralized ones. Meta's stuff his being preemptively blocked, but it's bound to happen eventually.
I subscribe to both.

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.

You're right but the other side of that is various instances seem to feel the need to address it and ask not to create duplicates in guides, which makes it feel like maybe there is an argument that the feature is not always a benefit in some scenarios.
- Yes, but isn't it a bit unfair (not to mention hardly enforcable) to demand of new instances not to host certain communities because the already exist on instance xyz? Even on Reddit there were spin-off communities due to powertripping mods. So far the most likely solution seems to be topic clustering, which we can probably expect in some future update.

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 think in that case the "forced" centralisation is purely constructed. There are no mechanisms preventing somebody from creating an android community in their own instance and federating it with lemmy.world. Even if !android@lemmy.world is permanently locked, that fact isn't really a barrier to entry for another android community to pop up, just that that community was able to establish a subscriber base over time but I don't see why another android community couldn't do the same given some time, especially if the available android communities at the moment are locked and restricted.
Imo admins should not allow the lockdown of a community on one instance in favor of the one on another. It's fine if the original mod wants to switch, but then just get someone else to mod the community or close it down until someone decides to claim it again.

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.

This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
- The Linux community still does that tbh. Just because it works for some to scout the internet for jUsT tHrEe CoMmAnDs, doesn’t mean that it is easy or accessible to folks that just want a working system with working hardware acceleration (in the example of Fedora refusing to include codecs & a working MESA driver by default). Some people really enjoy making their and other’s lives harder 🙄
I really don't understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that's the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.

Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit's r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don't want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
- I do not have a problem with the nerd/tech bubble being on Lemmy and I am not hostile towards them. I have a problem with them being the ONLY community able to participate because how complicated some aspects of this platform are. Why would Lemmy have to be ONLY "on the nerdy side". Different people with different interests can coexist because you can create whatever community you want and they can also decide what content they want to see or not. Who are you talking about when you say "We". It's not like you or the tech community owns the feediverse. They might host most of the servers because guess what tech savvy people know how to do that but that's just part of the problem.
  
  I strongly disagree with the whole idea of a site going down in quality when everyone uses it. There will be more bad content but only because there will be immensely more content in general which is the major benefit that Reddit had. "Bots, shills, ads" are a side effect of a site being popular and you can't have the one without the other. Reddit did not die a "slow death". Before the whole API things millions of people browsed Reddit everyday and created interesting content. If you don't like r/all the solution is obvious: Don't go there. Only visit the parts of the site that you are interested in. That's the whole concept of the home page. It has nothing to do with users refusing to learn but rather the site making it harder that it has to be.

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.

The problem is that while subscribed you see the popular posts twice. All of them. Sometimes even literally one after the other in the feed lol

Right now we just choose between seeing almost everything twice (sub to both) or missing a little (sub to only one).
- I don't really see it being too different from reddit when subbed to to subreddits that have similar topics. I'd see the same topic multiple times.
  
  The thing is, I went to reddit for the discussion and it would be different depending on which community the post was in and that can be the case here. A news sub in lemmy.world is going to have a more general view but a news sub in my own instance will have more LGBTQ people in the discussions.

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.

Some people seem to have gotten the idea that Lemmy needs to grow and to do that it needs all this drivel posted to it. Not sure why tho.
- Possibly because if comms stay empty for a long time, people will search for content elsewhere, and lemmy get forgotten.
  
  Remember that many people come from reddit, and are searching for a place where new content is easy to find.

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

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 major concern is whether to cross-post so that members of only one community can see posts from the other, or to avoid cross posts so that people subscribed to both don't see duplicates
- As with almost every other question about the fediverse, we already discussed this to death decades ago and came up with the answers for email. Do what you'd do for two mailing lists on 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.

I am new to this side of the fediverse. Why did Beehaw defederate?
- Lemmy.world had open signups. There was a large influx of trolls that took advantage of the open signups to do so and then brigade Beehaw. The Beehaw admins like and respect the lemmy.world admin and anticipate defederation.
- Beehaw defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because both of those instances allow(ed?) registering without email verification/captcha. They said it is bringing bots and spams. Haven't seen this issue personally. I recommend being a member of an instance that still federates with both lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works and Beehaw.

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

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

That will be as useless as multireddit The only option is to make the default all agglomeration of all communities of the same name on all instances. And then you block the ones you don't like

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

Love this idea - can definitely imagine merging communities with the same name being a clean solution.
- If you turn on the news do you think acquiring all of your information is best from one news channel? Soon as a community grasps a bias they start to hivemind and tune out counter points. I believe having multiple communities with multiple biases to be more secure.

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.

I'm probably going to be writing up a guide that tries to use non loaded language to describe the different flavors of lemmy for when my friend joins when Boost becomes available. But I actually really like that there's !politics@lemmy.world and it's very centered, there's !politics@beehaw.org and it leans left, and there's !politics@exploding-heads.com ans its very right wing conservative. I want to make a guide because I think the downside is none of the domains clearly denote the makeup of the moderation teams beliefs without some investment into exploring the fediverse and seeing what's what.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just like multi-reddits used to do.

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.

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.

This is exactly it.

One of the things I really hated on reddit was that r/futurology and r/energy got taken over by anti-nuclear activist mods who went so far as to pro-actively ban people who were active on r/nuclear, even if they never posted or commented on those subs.

This is simply not possible in the fediverse, since it will allow anyone to create a new energy or futurology community on a different server.

Isn’t it a bit of an annoying having repeat questions about repeat communities across various Lemmy instances?

It will work itself out. There have been splits in the past. /r/Indianapacers became /r/pacers and /r/prowrestling became /r/squaredcircle.

The real issue is having the same username on multiple instances. It's going to cause issues.

Honestly, I'm fine with it. If servers go down, we have multiple fallback communities

I don't think there's a problem with that. Diversity is a good thing. I sub to both in that situation. I'm subbed here and to an ask lemmy community on .world as well.

Why does it bother you?

To be honest I don’t see the issue with multiple similar communities. It’s no different to how Reddit would have many subreddits with similar themes. For example on Reddit there were dozens of Star Wars subs so people would subscribe to them all

To be fair, this often happened on Reddit as well. I was subscribed to 6 virtual reality subs, and at least that many 3d printing.

One issue I’ve found with this model is that content is being cross posted pretty heavily, meaning I’ll see the same post by the same person 5 times in the matter of a few minutes.

I’m trying to keep in mind that it’s still early, and communities are still finding their way. The ones that form an identity will have a larger base, and will become the de facto place that posts are made.

Why is it annoying? What would happen if you subscribed to both?

Sounds good to me. Those big default subs were always trash and prone to brigading. Not that i think there was ever a state where a general political discussion group couldn't be trash but you get what i mean

I’m subscribed to both and I’ve barely seen any posts from either. I’m hoping to start getting some diverse content from both of them.

"Freedom of choice,

Is what you got,

Freedom from choice,

Is what you want."

DEVO
"Freedom of Coice"
Freedom of Choice
1980

No.

I understand why it can be beneficial but it brings so many potential complications and issues that I think on balance it would be worth trying to address it somehow, maybe through codes of conduct, policy and enhanced search and validation at the point a community is created. Wouldn't be perfect by any means, and I don't think it should be a requirement to stop duplicate communities - but as an example to prevent issues with mergers and fractured user bases, with the android community being a recent instance of a disgruntled users where an established community has been shut down and moved to another instance with no way for the existing community to reclaim their space.

There are potentially issues with community name squatting, duplicate content and cross posting, users missing out on conversation from one instance if they aren't aware of it; and when large companies start to move into the space, there will be communities swallowed up potentially, and the various issues and questions and clashes it causes.

I suspect there are also going to be issues as the site grows with where servers are located and how compliant they are with GDPR and other regulations too.

Even the getting started guide for .world (and others) mention check other instances for duplicate communities first, so it is likely something that needs to be addressed in some form.

It's a really interesting subject that will be fascinating to see how it unfolds over time!

I would rather see instances focused on topics with niche communities within them.

For example, a lemmy.POLITICS instance with communities for WORLD, US, EU, LATAM, etc

I second this idea. But everyone wants to be king of their own castle so either mods need to share responsibility on a single community. Lemmy supports cross instance mods so no need to have multiple accounts.
- We are still in the early days of the fediverse. Once this thing gets figured out and stabilized, I think we could see some progress in consolidating duplicate communities…
  
  But does the broader group of users want this model?

It's certainly the biggest annoyance to me so far. I like things to be streamlined and as simple as possible. Having multiple communities for the same topic is just messy.

Freedom & Democracy are messy. Some people don't like then for that reason.
- Yeah I appreciate this but I am particularly OCD about keeping things organised and it's currently really difficult to do that on Lemmy.

Not really - as the weeks and months go by, people will gravitate... and individual groups can update their names/descriptions if they become aware of a similar instance.

They aren't repeat instances they are very different.

I usually subscribe to the ones on my instance. If there are none I subscribe to the one with more members.

Its kind of annoying seeing amazon and walmart on the same internet as well.

This is federstion

Yeah. I too find it annoying.

Do you believe if you pick up the new york times it will have the same take as the bbc? I want more than 1 car magazine to exist. If one magazine starts to do things I don't enjoy I can use another. Example, threads makes a car magazine, has more user base and everyone flocks to it over time for more frequent content change. Now threads starts manipulating content and putting in more advertisements... either you now have to go through a big change, or you just go to motortrend for a while until they have to hopefully scale back ads and such to keep users.
- idk. it's more like having 6 magazines about hyundai cars, i never know which of the ones to buy because they all look the same, and if i just buy half of them, the article i'm interested in is guaranteed to be in the one i didn't buy.
  
  and one day they all vanish after neither one sold enough copies to make profit.
  
  it splits the community, what is a bad thing if the community isn't super big to begin with. and it adds extra confusion to new users. and extra effort for people who want to stay up to date. and if i have a niche question i can't just ask many people at once. i first have to look up in which community i need to ask. or i just ask in every community and annoy the people who subscribed to multiple ones.... it's just not a good solution to anything...
  
  the one thing where this would be a good thing is if the communities were reasonably different. different in topic, focus, a noticable different culture of discussion or moderation, something drastic enough to warrant people splitting up ... like your analogy with the nyt or bbc. but it's simply not the case for these communities.

Yes it is annoying. And you have to create a new account on each instance to interact.

What? You can subscribe and post to all of them from any instance just fine.
No you don't. Federation means you can subscribe and post in a community on one instance with the account from another instance.
You can subscribe to other instances communities via your home instance's search. That's what I've been doing anyways.
Maybe it's in the works