For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.
What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?
I join the biggest one
Subbing to all of them, contributing where I can, and seeing what happens :)
I like the idea of different communities. A single giant “community” like reddit feels too big. Effectively no one can participate and the only content you see is the least common denominator. I think what needs to happen though is a better integration of local vs federal instances. There should be a toggle within a certain community page to see versions from other instances.
I like the idea of different communities. A single giant “community” like reddit feels too big
This is a good point. Some users prefer being in a community with a lower number of subscribers. Not everyone wants to post in a community with a million users so having big and small communities for the same thing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It gives people the choice to decide which one they want to participate in.
I think it depends on the community. For entertainment stuff like videos, anime, memes, etc. I’d prefer a bunch of smaller ones. But hobby type communities, where you aren’t only looking at newest posts, I’d rather one big organized community.
For instance, if I want to buy some new headphones then is would be a pain to have to look through 6 different instances for a stickied reccomendation thread.
It is surely going to be a bigger time sink and possibly more effective skinner box if I have to click back and forth between half a dozen different communities to follow different threads on stuff like breaking news or game/event threads.
I think this will ultimately be polarizing, but I also kind of think it will have a lot of really interesting side effects as it scales.
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I just subscribe to both of them, the more mindless scroll content, the better >:D
I just keep an eye on all of them.
Eventually this whole thing will sort itself out and the snowball effect will see some communities get bigger while others fall to the wayside. It’s a natural progression.I sub to them all, and then order the communities to fight each other. The last community standing is the winner. Surprisingly, none of this has ever happened yet.
Because communities on Lemmy are still in their infancy I join all of them (at least the larger ones) and will wait to see which of them gather traction.
I just subscribe to all of them. And I feel it’s worth pointing out that this was a thing on Reddit too. I often saw the same post on two or three different subreddits I was subscribed to. Eg. I was subscribed to both CanadaPolitics and Ontario, so Ontario politics stuff often appeared twice. Three times if it was local Ottawa news that made provincial and national headlines.
As a new mod of c/Alberta, the community for the province is much larger on Lemmy.ca.
However, that’s also simply because people are more likely to subscribe with how much more focused the instance is on Canada, so it’s a given more people will join it.
Honestly, so far, while I’ve been trying to get the Alberta community here up and running, I have no issue with the one on Lemmy.ca existing. If anything, I hope that the communities can co-exist because perhaps it’ll become the case where certain instances will develop their own cultures in the same way some Peertube instances do. We even have the Lemmy.ca communities relating to the province in the community sidebar to encourage people to take advantage of the federated nature of Lemmy.
I’ve been joining all of them. I might pare down if I need to at some point, but I want to try to catch all the discussion on a topic.
