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.
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 namedtech
, they are still distinct from one another by the website that’s hosting them.No the domain name is always part of the ID unless it’s your home instance.
A very precise way to phrase this is to say:
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 oldtechnology
. 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.