It's okay to not know something. We aren't born with perfect knowledge of subreddits. Reddit was just as confusing at first.

I'm think what you're feeling is not really the community duplication (although that's worse right now cause everything was dead 2w ago and there's almost no downside to making new communities cause almost nothing is well established), but rather the poor community discovery.

One of the engines that drove the "natural" aggregation of users in the big subreddits is that when you searched for subreddits the big ones were at the top of the list. When you search on Lemmy, the big communities may not be on the list at all. But I think folks recognize this as a challenge and will work on it. This week is about keeping the lights on though.

We don't need to become reddit though, reddit is the problem. There is something about how it's structured that encourages toxicity. I would be more concerned about keeping these communities positive and welcoming. We don't need to make it inviting to all of reddit... I'm sure I'm not the only one that would rather see hurdles for entry than open floodgates for the kind of stuff that was making even the nicest and sanest of people into crazy assholes. My outlook has completely changed since leaving that cesspool and I'm actually horrified by how nihilistic it had made me. The world is a mess but reddit is worse.