So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Is there a way to find/pick the “right” one, or should it just be based on whichever has the most users?
New to Fediverse (here and Mastodon), still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
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This is what it is in fediverse. Multiple instances can have same communities.
If I’m looking lulz communities, I just subscribe to those with most users, because most likely it will be more active.
If I’m looking for tech or something useful, I subscribe to most of them, and then filter them after some time. Not all communities will fit your style, and you will have to choose with which community you are more compatible.
moreover, the number of subscribers you see in search result represents subscribers from your instance only. It is very noticeable when you on a small instance. I.e. this number is not a solid criteria either.
Is that a bug? It would be helpful to see a total number sometimes.
I do not know. For me this looks like a side effect of federation: you gen data from your instance, and it has info about local subscribers only. Anyways, the name of this value is misleading, this is for sure.
I didn’t know this – cheers!
What about this website I’ve been using?
to be fair, you can make “infinite” subreddits too. I can make showerthought, thoughtswhileshowering, deepthoughts, jackhandy, etc, etc right now.
clearly in your screenshot, one has risen to the top, so there you go, check done.
Oh which client is that ?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !thunder_app@lemmy.world)
I’m not sure if that link is supposed to take a user somewhere, but clicking the bot’s link from within Connect doesn’t work. The leading “!” Is not highlighted in blue, so that’s probably why it doesn’t work.
The link in the parent comment does work within Connect and takes me to that community.
That’s the format to link to a community, similar to something like someone commenting /r/askreddit on Reddit and it’ll link you when you click it.
It must be your app because it works on 3 different Android apps for me (testing out apps to see which I like)
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
- People don’t know they should check whether a community already exists, before creating it.
- People search to see if the community exists, but it doesn’t appear in the search results of the instance/server they live in.
- People see that a community already exists, but they aren’t happy with it and create their own.
It’s a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
Also note that in a federated network fragmentation is not bad and this is the shift in thinking everyone needs coming from facebook/twitter/reddit.
Those networks didn’t talk to each other so you had to fight a battle to get everyone in the same place for the best experience. This centralized power and data and allowed people to exploit you.
In a federated network, you get the content whereever you are and everyone has incentive to share. Duplicates create a robust ecosystem that cannot be taken down by 1 power hungry individual.
There is no reason to have a single community for any topic.
I agree with your point of view and its advantages. Of course it’s also a matter of degree. One can imagine the situation where there’s one “copy” of a community per server, or even per person; now this is absolutely unrealistic, but there’s a continuity of cases from that unrealistic situation to the present situation. Somewhere along that continuum, fragmentation becomes more negative than positive.
I think this is kind of a larger problem with the fediverse, and ultimately why it won’t displace Reddit.
If I subscribe to a community called music, as a user I expect to see all posts from the fediverse. Instead what we get is posts from a specific instance. Duplicate isolated communities is not user friendly.
Fediverse atm just feels like a complicated reinvention of forums.
the same is true with reddit. They may not have the exact same name, but how many music subreddits are there? I follow at least 5 or 6 on reddit, but there are thousands, many of which compete for the same or sim genres or ideas, but a few tend to be the one people gravitate too and so be it.
I run Alternative Nation here !alternativenation@lemmy.world but on reddit here are 3 of many options, but clearly on reddit indieheads got the users.
I suppose the confusion is because duplicate Lemmy communities across instances can haver the same name. Perhaps a solution to this would be to more prominently show the instance name alongside the community name.
I imagine we will get situations in the future where multiple same name communities gain traction, but may have different vibes. If it was easier to tell apart c/foobar on InstanceA from c/foobar on InstanceB on each part of the Lemmy interface it would be less confusing.
They don’t technically have the same name. The full name will be something like “music@kbin.whatever” or “music@lemmy.somethingorother”. The problem is whatever interface op is using isn’t showing the full community name which includes which instance it’s on.
The same is not true of Reddit.
If I subscribe to /r/music, I see all post.
If I as a user subscribe to /c/music on Lemmy.world, I get only posts from lemmy.world.
These two are completely different, and that’s why it is going to struggle.
https://lemmy.world/c/music https://sh.itjust.works/c/music
If we can’t simplify this problem, the platform will struggle to gain serious ground.
This is exactly like Reddit. On Reddit, if you subscribed to “gaming”, you would not also see posts from “games.” You would have to subscribe to both to see posts from both. If you want to see posts from music@lemmy.world, but also from music communities on other instances, you would subscribe to both.
Personally i like this. I think it gives the opportunity for each individual instance to flourish or fail.
My only fear is repost issues. Someone could obviously post to ALL those instances if they wanted to and they are perfectly within their right to. But if you’re subscribed to all of them you’ll see all instances versions of that post lol
Iirc if you crosspost properly (using the crosspost feature) it’d just show up once in in the home page.
