I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.

Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.

The most effective solution is to search for existing communities on federated instances before creating a new one on your instance. Then new communities are ideally only made if the existing community doesn’t meet your particular need or specific interest (eg. UnitedKingdom vs UKCasual), or if your instance doesn’t federate with the main community.

The same dispersion of userbase is present on reddit but the more popular urls/content will eventually become clear and less popular communities will either aggregate into the main one or become more niche (eg r/games vs r/gaming).

I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.

Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.

Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it’s on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.

I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance

Yea, it’s an endless debate lately.

Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it’s possible the small clones will be left behind.

Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.

Yes, limit instances to X number of communities. Forces people to use the search function properly, stops the large instances having all the communities, also has the positive effect of the user base spreading out rather than congregating on one or two big communities.

Embrace it, my homie. Think of lemmy use as more of a multireddit. Subscribe to things you prefer, then view it through that tab. So what if there’s a dozen posts about something big? It’s that way on reddit, facebook, and twitter for sure.

That’s the benefit of federation. You get to see all of what’s out there once you get used to the way it works. You’ll have less of a stranglehold on information because nobody can bogart a single community name. My edc community might restrict politics, but the one on beehaw might not, and the one at feddit might encourage it directly.

It’s much harder to accidentally fall into an echo chamber here with news. Not impossible! But harder. You’d have to choose to do so usually.

I know it seems weird, but trust the principle that underpins federation. It will settle out within a month or so of the migration. And it’ll be fairly democratic, with communities becoming popular based on how they function rather than name camping.

This is a culture shock for us r/efugees, but it is going to be so much harder for our communities to be ripped apart because of it.

Duplication happens on Reddit too. It’s not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.

Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.

I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).

The real question isn’t whether it will be good/bad … it’s what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.