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In my opinion, it makes most sense that they get treated like the same community.
If you subscribe to "c/memes", you will see the posts from any communities on any instances that's name is "memes".
And if any individual one is causing issue, you or your instance can ban the problem instances' version.
Here's one scenario where that idea doesn't work. I was subscribed to /r/pax on Reddit. Occasionally, people would wander through and post about their vapes or ecigs or whatever, not noticing that every post in the subreddit was about the Penny Arcade Expo and not about the ecig/vape brand. (Sorry. I don't know the difference between a vape and an e-cigarette, if there even is one. π )
All that to set up this question: what happens when a community is created on one Lemmy instance called "pax" referring to the Penny Arcade Expo while, on another instance, the first mover on "pax" is an e-cig/vape enthusiast? I subscribe for updates on the Penny Arcade Expo, and now, instead of an occasional misguided individual coming through posting about their nicotine enthusiasm, half or more of my posts on "pax" are about that?
Yeah that's fair.
I think the best situation is that as a general guideline short abbreviations like that are avoided, and in the case of unavoidable name collisions one or both communities would have to further specify the name to avoid conflict.
So the pros are easier user accessibility, a fix of duplicate communities, and the cons is name collisions and potential abuse from communities on different instances.
It wasn't always like that on Reddit... how did /r/technology beat out /r/tech? There's hundreds of examples of similar and competing sub names.
One naturally gets more popular. One post on one gets more traction, more people link to it, more people end up subscribing to that one. When new people search for a tech sub they naturally go for the one with all the subscribers. It's a self-perpetuating loop.
It's really no different on Lemmy. Since everything is interconnected and when you search "technology" both communities show up... one will eventually get bigger and become THE place. It's already happening.
It's not really as big an issue as people think. It's just that Lemmy is still in early days and the de facto communities aren't quite established yet. Give it a little time.
This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now letβs say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.
Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers