This is that part where people trying to bail on Reddit need to remember that this is NOT Reddit. Lemmy is similar to Reddit but is not designed to replace Reddit as a SINGULAR centralized entity ^hence, yknow, all the decentralized talk.^

If you only want one server, with one set of communities, there are alternatives in the works. If you want to use Lemmy, you need to shift your expectations. The entire point here is that while one c/aww may "win," you can still have your own c/aww on your instance as a completely separate entity that can be ran and moderated differently by different people, and person C can have their own c/aww again independent of the others.

You can follow one, you can follow all, but they remain separate communities on separate instances.

I think it is just going to be one of those crazy growing pains until users start picking one of them. And in true internet fashion, I fully expect gaming to consolidate around two, starting the next great flame war.

there were redundant communities on reddit, there are always redundant communities, we are in a phase where we will see more not less. This is not a huge issue overall, though it will be distressing to those who have become accustom to what 6 and 7 figure subs are like.

realistically, i dont think its the best idea to hand any one server the majoirty of any topic or content, you will end up with the same problems all over again. Instead I would want to see tagging and a way to integrate community content from multiple communities. Something as simple as being able to make a community that is just a subscription list of many communities and shows thier content will work.

I just collect them like candy. Oh, another tech board? Added.

I don't particularly care which community a post comes from. Subbing for me is so I am made aware of their posts. I honestly don't care where it was posted.

It’ll sort itself out. Kinda like how you could have a bunch of different subreddits about the same thing (r/gaming vs r/games vs r/videogames, for example) but one always bubbles up to be the biggest main community. Similar will happen here. There’ll be many instances for the same thing, but eventually there’ll be “the one” that becomes the unofficial official one.

I think the main solution is to have an easy way of searching for existing communities before deciding to make you own. browse.feddit.de seems to be a good step in that direction to me.

reddit also had that a bunch of places, for example /r/gaming /r/games /r/truegaming.

Reddit had similar issues. There were quite often multiple subreddits that were essentially the same thing. Sometimes it was just that multiple people made similar subreddits, sometimes there was one original subreddit that had some sort of schism.

It's just that Reddit had a large enough userbase that two near-identical subreddits could do well enough that one didn't supplant the other.

I'm on Fediverse for few years and reading all the replies here I find it ... sad? Funny? I really don't know what to think of this. It looks like for many people the biggest disadvantage of federation is federation itself ... It feels like people want the centralization and don't want to have options (or rather think about the options)

Or is it an age thing? I'm kind of used to lurk the internet and find what I want. But I can imagine that people raised on f.e. Netflix, Amazon where it's like "BAM! Here you have everything" aren't used to this

This will probably take care of itself with time. Not having any "official" ones dictated by some central authority is kind of the whole idea of the fediverse.

I'm just trying to subscribe to as many of the duplicates as I come across for communities I see and like. I suspect eventually some will become the most popular ones and 'win' the unofficial title as the 'main one' if the overall user base continues to grow. Am I right in thinking it also depends on which instances your 'home instance' continues to federate with (IE admins don't block) or have I totally misunderstood and overcomplicated how it works in my mind?

If I'm understanding this whole thing correctly: an instance that your 'home instance' (where you signed up) has federated with might host a larger user base for one community, but if their admins blocks your home instance or vice versa, you lose the ability to interact with that community(?) I would think this means ideally you want your home instance to host the community that 'wins' so you're less likely to lose access, right?

So if hypothetically for whatever reason lemmy.world or lemmy.ml blocked the other, users who signed up on lemmy.world would lose access to the communities hosted on lemmy.ml and vice versa. So duplicates would still pop up if the most popular community is hosted somewhere your home doesn't have access to, right? I'm far less likely to create multiple accounts just to access an unofficial 'main' cat community than I am to just click 'subscribe' on any available sub with the word 'cat' in it.

I just sub to both if I run into a sublemmy collision where both are sizable. It is a little weird and I'd like to see some clean way to merge them in the future (i.e. with content migration and redirects), but for now it is what it is.

I'd say it's a problem that will solve itself. Beehaw's gaming communities seem to be doing better than Lemmy's, and I'd highly encourage giving them a look. Part of the greatness of the federation system is that we don't have to host EVERYTHING locally (and it's probably not desirable to).

After all, if Lemmy does some stuff really well, and Beehaw does some stuff really well, both of us can thrive together without both sides having to eat hosting costs for double hosting all the content.

Imo. This is the opposite of having a too big of a community. I think this is just a disadvantage of federation that we will eventually have to live with. The opposite is a bigger problem in my opinion, where one entity controls too much of the power.

What we really need is a better system, be it an app or chrome extension where it makes it easier for us to manage these instances version of their communities.

I don't know what that looks like but the answer isn't difficult to come up with because for the most part, all the lemmies will function the same as each other.

This is actually a very compelling OSS project to make. A Lemmy manager like rss readers of past.

I think it will for the most part sort itself out. I do see this issue has been brought up before but didn't get much traction.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I think that something like being able to group communities by topics would help a lot. You could then just sub to all communities that are tagged with the topic, then the fragmentation really doesn't matter nearly as much. Posts would get spread out across communities and instances (which I think is a good thing) but would still have a decent amount of visibility.

We are still in the discovery zone where the communities are spread out, over time it will stabilize.

The first site to figure this out def has the biggest chance of being “the one” right now

I don't think this is a problem. It's the same on reddit where you can have multiple gaming subreddits or multiple news subreddits. Eventually the communities will consolidate.

This is a nothing burger. Who cares if there's a hundred different cat instances. That's already what it was.

There can only be one orange cat instance? Give it a fucking break

We just need a more user-friendly way for all the !gaming instances to be grouped together, with users having the control of adding/removing what makes up their personal !gaming on their chosen fediverse instance.

I also struggle to see the issue here. People will subscribe to the various communities across instances, and they’ll quit the ones they don’t like, thereby making the best ones rise to the top, just like it works across subreddits of the same topic.

I guess the concern is discoverability? On mobile web, Beehaw’s homepage show “Local” (not sure if just Beehaw or all instance). It’s true that it’d be good if the default was “All”, so discoverability isn’t fragmented.

Yeah I this is my biggest problem, and there's always like 30 people saying "it's not a problem, it's a feature!"

Either they are in denial or I'm just completely incompatible with federation.

Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing? If I wanted to consume content from all of them sure, I could follow all 100 but that is so tedious. Plus what if I wanted to interact with them? I'd have to ask the same question 100 times!