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?
Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it’s on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.
Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.
‘Stop asking this’ is not a really helpful thing to say. We have a lot of new users, including myself, and everybody is figuring out how Lemmy works. Redundant questions will occur and lets answer those in a respectful manner.
I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance
I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.
Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.
Lemme give my case.
I see what you did there.
Didn’t intend to do that, but hey…
Duplication happens on Reddit too. It’s not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.
Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.
I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).
The real question isn’t whether it will be good/bad … it’s what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.
I often preferred using the alternate/splinter versions of many reddit subs. When a sub got too large, the quality went down fast. I think the redundancy is maybe a good thing.
I think critical mass is needed for certain communities, and user splitting is bad for that.
