So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Is there a way to find/pick the “right” one, or should it just be based on whichever has the most users?
New to Fediverse (here and Mastodon), still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
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to be fair, you can make “infinite” subreddits too. I can make showerthought, thoughtswhileshowering, deepthoughts, jackhandy, etc, etc right now.
clearly in your screenshot, one has risen to the top, so there you go, check done.
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
- People don’t know they should check whether a community already exists, before creating it.
- People search to see if the community exists, but it doesn’t appear in the search results of the instance/server they live in.
- People see that a community already exists, but they aren’t happy with it and create their own.
It’s a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
Also note that in a federated network fragmentation is not bad and this is the shift in thinking everyone needs coming from facebook/twitter/reddit.
Those networks didn’t talk to each other so you had to fight a battle to get everyone in the same place for the best experience. This centralized power and data and allowed people to exploit you.
In a federated network, you get the content whereever you are and everyone has incentive to share. Duplicates create a robust ecosystem that cannot be taken down by 1 power hungry individual.
There is no reason to have a single community for any topic.
I agree with your point of view and its advantages. Of course it’s also a matter of degree. One can imagine the situation where there’s one “copy” of a community per server, or even per person; now this is absolutely unrealistic, but there’s a continuity of cases from that unrealistic situation to the present situation. Somewhere along that continuum, fragmentation becomes more negative than positive.
agreed, its a balance like most things
Oh which client is that ?
I feel like we need a FAQ to link people to. This is one of those topics that new users post ever few days.
I wish mods would close these threads and point people to the FAQ.
I think this is kind of a larger problem with the fediverse, and ultimately why it won’t displace Reddit.
If I subscribe to a community called music, as a user I expect to see all posts from the fediverse. Instead what we get is posts from a specific instance. Duplicate isolated communities is not user friendly.
Fediverse atm just feels like a complicated reinvention of forums.
the same is true with reddit. They may not have the exact same name, but how many music subreddits are there? I follow at least 5 or 6 on reddit, but there are thousands, many of which compete for the same or sim genres or ideas, but a few tend to be the one people gravitate too and so be it.
I run Alternative Nation here !alternativenation@lemmy.world but on reddit here are 3 of many options, but clearly on reddit indieheads got the users.
I suppose the confusion is because duplicate Lemmy communities across instances can haver the same name. Perhaps a solution to this would be to more prominently show the instance name alongside the community name.
I imagine we will get situations in the future where multiple same name communities gain traction, but may have different vibes. If it was easier to tell apart c/foobar on InstanceA from c/foobar on InstanceB on each part of the Lemmy interface it would be less confusing.
agreed that the instance name should be clear, as well as the user & active user numbers to help guide people.
The same is not true of Reddit.
If I subscribe to /r/music, I see all post.
If I as a user subscribe to /c/music on Lemmy.world, I get only posts from lemmy.world.
These two are completely different, and that’s why it is going to struggle.
https://lemmy.world/c/music https://sh.itjust.works/c/music
If we can’t simplify this problem, the platform will struggle to gain serious ground.
On reddit though, there are thousand of music communities. How did you know which was the right one? Subscriber count.
it’s okay though, it’s early days, pretty sure some communities in some instances will be the main one. You’ll see the user counts and active users to help guide you. And maybe there WILL be two mains for the same topic - is that bad? If 2 general music communities both have huge active users, just subscribe to both! easy peasy!
I’ve subscribed to a few dupes here, it’s all gravy. And I’m doing my best to nurture an alternative music community. =)
Personally i like this. I think it gives the opportunity for each individual instance to flourish or fail.
My only fear is repost issues. Someone could obviously post to ALL those instances if they wanted to and they are perfectly within their right to. But if you’re subscribed to all of them you’ll see all instances versions of that post lol
Iirc if you crosspost properly (using the crosspost feature) it’d just show up once in in the home page.
That’s cool! Didn’t know that
Just sub to the ones you want and set your feed to home. You’ll only see the single ones you subbed to. And you’re right, these are same names in different instances/servers. Completely normal.
Just join them both and forget about it.
