No built-in way. Not anymore than multiple subreddits for the same purpose. Eventually one will become the more popular. It's nothing new.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Why doesn't X, the bigger community, simply eat the smaller communities?
Treat them like different subs like /r/askreddit and /r/trueaskreddit
There currently is no way - and in my opinion should be no way to prevent duplicate communities across instances. One community will eventually become popular enough to be considered the de facto community, though we shouldn’t force interaction with an instance simply because they have dibs on a community name.
Less discerning users can subscribe to both communities.
Yeah, I think this is going to be an issue/ something that the community is going to have to think about. It actually makes more sense for lemmy instances (like wallstreets.bet) to focus on particular subcultures/ types of communities, rather than being catch alls. This has a couple advantages in that you can replicate some of the structure of reddit (like having tagged posts), and it allows federation to focus on connecting to things that makes sense. This way resolves the duplicity issues.