Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?

This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.

  •  blitzen   ( @blitzen@lemmy.ml ) OPEnglish
    13•1 year ago

    I thank you for your response, and generally think you are right. Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit to: is the existence of multiple communities on a given subject a feature of Lemmy (perhaps even unique to Lemmy) we should expect and embrace, or do you think communities coalescing into few/one will occur naturally?

    •  thegiddystitcher   ( @thegiddystitcher@beehaw.org ) English
      29•1 year ago

      Not the person you asked but personally I do think it’ll naturally happen that we just end up glomming together into certain communities. That’s how it tends to go with any such thing. But one slightly overlooked benefit is that splinter communities can have the same name. No passive-agressive “/c/thetopic”, “/c/realthetopic”, “/c/betterthetopic”, “/c/thetopicwithouttoxicmods” etc etc etc.

      •  nosurf   ( @nosurf@lemmy.world ) English
        2•1 year ago

        Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?

        •  pineapple   ( @pineapple@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com ) English
          14•1 year ago

          Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?

          Nope! That’s why community names are often formatted like community@website. As many instances can use the same community name as they like, everyone can see and individually interact with each of them. Even if two communities are both named tech, they are still distinct from one another by the website that’s hosting them.

        •  PriorProject   ( @PriorProject@lemmy.world ) English
          2•1 year ago

          A very precise way to phrase this is to say:

          There is no community called technology on Lemmy. There is a community called !technology@beehaw.org and a separate community called !technology@lemmy.ml. They are different communities with different mods that discuss similar topics. Their proper “names” are comprised of BOTH the topic description AND the home instance.

          Every community on Reddit happens to share the same home instance, like mysub@reddit.com, but it makes very little difference if you start thinking of the sub-name as just being comprised of both parts.

          Another funny wrinkle is that your home instance will often (always?) hide the instance name from local communities. So for someone with an account on lemmy.ml, !technology@lemmy.ml will look like just plain old technology. But this is just how the UI styles local communities, they still homed to the instance where your account is, and they are still most precisely and correctly described with their full identifier, including their instance name as anything else is ambiguous to people with accounts on various different instances.

    •  PriorProject   ( @PriorProject@lemmy.world ) English
      1•1 year ago

      Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit to: is the existence of multiple communities on a given subject a feature of Lemmy (perhaps even unique to Lemmy) we should expect and embrace, or do you think communities coalescing into few/one will occur naturally?

      My take is that Reddit, Lemmy, and any system that allows non-admins to create subreddits/sublemmies/communities/whatever pretty much plays out similarly:

      • Overlapping communities are a feature of lemmy, but also reddit.
      • They are not unique to lemmy.
      • People DO embrace overlapping communities to work out differences in moderation policies, to escape annoying culture, to achieve a smaller/cozier feel. But all this is hard work, and generally… unless there’s a reason to do extra hard work to maintain a smaller duplicate community…
      • Communities coalesce into few/one naturally.

      I don’'t feel like any of this is really different in the fediverse, the only difference is that the community name is longer tech@lemmy.ml instead of /r/tech. But tech@lemmy.ml and tech@beehaw.org isn’t functionally any different than /r/tech and /r/otherTechSucksOursIsGood. The social dynamics that determine community participation play out in almost exactly the same way in both cases.

      The few exceptions are with a lemmy instance that doesn’t federate to any/most instances and has limited account signups. That sort of lemmy instance could create intentionally separate communities that are really tightly controlled. So you could talk about tech news exclusively with computer-science students at your university or something. But at that point it’s less like lemmy the fediverse app and more like a standalone bulletin-board system like phpbb or something. For almost all lemmy instances and almost all communities on them, overlapping lemmy communities behave very similarly to overlapping subreddits.