Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?
This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.
There are plenty of subs that have branched off due to corrupt mods and other things.
/r/meirl and /r/me_irl
/r/web_design and /r/webdesign (merged now, though)
/r/gaming, /r/truegaming
but I do agree with you. It definitely hurts to have communities fragmented. Especially if new users don’t understand how to view or subscribe to communities outside their instance, they may never see the more popular community on a different instance.
I think changing the default view for content and communities would help. Branching off is one thing and there may be a valid reason for the split. However, I wonder how many current duplicates are accidental. The current setup for Lemmy is to view Local communities by default. An intentional creation of a separate community for a reason is one thing.
Fragmentation of the communities will probably end up happening with time but I don’t know that it’s best to have things fragment early on when communities and those identities are still, in some cases, in the early stages of development.
The “true” prefix opens a lot of subs and points to a problem with moderation and flash popularity.
At least with lemmy we can easily go to another instance if a mod goes banana.