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 don’t see this as an issue. One of two things will happen:
Each community that has similar or same topics will begin to specialize: ie: the 25+ Apple subreddits. These communities will then become (if I have the nomenclature correct) “Comminities” within an “umbrella” topic.
If there are competing communities with a narrow topic, one will prove out, or if one goes off the rails, another will spin up to replace it. The Fediverse is, like a mesh, self healing.
The goal here is not to try and artificially constrain Lemmy to the limitations of the Reddit architecture, but to explore what is possible within a federation structured “information aggregator.”
Personally, my experiences on Lemmy have not differed much from Reddit, with the sole difference I did not need to purge a pre-defined Front Page. The only thing I really miss are some of the specific subreddits that have no analogs in the Lemmy Fediverse; and the ability to aggregate “like topics” as I did with multi-subreddits).