If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
I raised that concern too. As I understand it, there are a couple of different answers:
Some people seem to feel that one version of a community will eventually become the clear preferred choice, and users will migrate from other communities to that one. I think that will only happen when there is better implementation of the ability to find communities, particularly by activity. Right now that’s not at all easy within Lemmy.
It can also be argued that smaller duplicate communities are more in keeping with the spirit of the Fediverse. That they will keep resource use divided among servers, thereby not burdening any one server with enormous amounts of traffic. I’m not sure that I’m convinced by that one.
I suggested some possible solutions, and I believe that the devs are at least aware of the issue. But I’m sure that they are beyond overloaded right now. My guess is that they are simply doing everything they can to keep Lemmy running under the impact of the Great Reddit Migration.
I wish there was a community for suggesting improvements and new features for Lemmy. Maybe there is one, and I just don’t know about it?
Feature requests make more sense on the Github issues list, and there’s a LOT of stuff there already. But in case you’ve not seen them there’s !lemmy@lemmy.ml (direct link) for general discussion of the platform and !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml (direct link) for tech support.