How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?

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

This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

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?
- 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.
- 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 [email protected] instead of /r/tech. But [email protected] and [email protected] 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.

I don't think people know (how end-users will cope with the distributed choices of Lemmy). Reddit 2023 is nothing at all like Lemmy. One could be considered a household name for regular users of the Internet, the other a return to something more like FidoNet.

I come from the BBS days of the early 1980's and even social media radio before that. I come from IRL user group meetings, held at public library and after-hours company meeting rooms. It has always bothered me that current-day subreddits have mostly no identity to the moderators and that moderation is often behind the scenes.

I guess it's like "corporate experience" that people expect this day in society... that you can walk into a generic franchise chain bar and grill and not really care who the owner/operator and bouncers are of your hangout. Anyone can start a topic/ conversation and there is just some anonymous janitorial crew who is supposed to clean up the overflowing mess if (non-venue) spam or hate messages enter into the space.

The mechanisms of who pays for the venue and the moderators also was a topic most people never bothered to think about. Like it was some taxpayer-funded city park and perhaps the admin police might spot check if anyone was causing a tragedy in that there commons. But reality is that it was a profit-seeking venue charging a cover charge in the form of selling copies of your contribution and changing the tone of your meeting space by controlling the jukebox that visitors hear in terms of advertising messages inserted into the conversation space.

Lemmy seems small, owner/operator focused, and you get a sense that each instance is like some small bar and grill where you can come and meet some strangers or friends to discuss some topics under house rules. Your tips help pay for the hosting and the jukebox isn't piped in memes from advertisers.

I remember when Reddit had known owners with known ideals, but that was very long ago. I've found making it big (with the associated wealth) changes people. One owner even committed suicide over his society ideals about sharing information. Ultimately I feel like a lack of topic participation by the moderators and owners alike made people thoughtless as to their own role in building a human community and people often felt like they were fighting machines and code.

sorry if this meandered off topic, but lately I've had some long-time friends ask me 'what is Reddit" since it is in the news lately, and I find it hard to explain what Reddit used to be (before new Reddit and the addition of images/video) vs. the corporate-like entity we know today that our contributions and participation helped empower over the past 17 years. I've used it mostly daily for all that time, and I have been unhappy with society's dehumanizing direction for too many years.

/ramble from a disturbed mind.

I hear you man. I went from active contributor to mostly lurking on Reddit, and it wasn't even a conscious choice. Gradually, everything became very mechanistic. I knew what the top few comments would be before going to the comments. The churn became cyclic in nature.

After just a few days here, it was actually a little disconcerting how antagonistic and hostile people there are in the comments section. That's just how people communicate, on a hair-trigger from flamewar.

I recognize your username, I saw what you wrote about SQL scaling. Can you imagine recognizing a username in a major subreddit in the reddit of today?

The dichotomy between the big communities which people subscribe to from all over Lemmy and the small meta/announcement/server issue communities for each individual instance is gonna be interesting to see develop as the userbase increases. Kinda like the difference between seeing people from your street everyday, then many more less familiar people in the city center.
- I agree with what both of you are saying about the antagonism of the community writ large, but I am going to miss the small subs. There are dozens of them I subbed that have 500 or 1k users and are really tightly focused communities. They still have that feel from 2010ish reddit.
  
  I'm ready to close the book on reddit as a whole, but I really will miss r/heavyseas and r/obscuremedia and r/theocho and r/desirepath etc.
- Can you imagine recognizing a username in a major subreddit in the reddit of today?
  
  I have noticed this recognition on large posts on modern reddit, but it's usually for not good reasons, because the poster is just karma whoring.
- It depends on the subreddit as well. There are some where discussion is expected. /r/nbadiscussion versus /r/nba, for example. The former will get into some good discussions if there's a player looking to be traded. On /r/nba, you'll get a bit of that but you'll also get a few dozen, "He gone," comments.
  
  I appreciate both at various times. I go into /r/nba specifically for the funny takes and will go to /r/nbadiscussion when I'm feeling like reading something more. That said, even /r/nba can get into some pretty impressive posts with stats, diagrams, and excellent breakdowns. It just depends on the day.
  
  I think the funnier times are where you expect one thing and get another. I can go into /r/guitarcirclejerk expecting some light hearted shitposting and end up with a great discussion on one thing or another.
Thanks for laying out this analogy. I agree with your sentiment and think it extends outside of the internet too. When I think of different scenes in the real world, they feel like they’ve all fallen into either super corporate places where you’re encouraged to spend money or meetup groups with no personality.
This is a great analogy, well explained.

It's a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don't think democratically and rule against other people's will deleting posts and banning everyone they don't like.

With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)

This assumes that power doesn't corrupt and that the big "kind" communities don't eventually turn bad.
- That's exactly the point: if they become "bad", we can always move to another one with the same name but on another instance
- Just to chime in, the other issue is consolidation of these communities by a small handful of people (i.e. powermods).
  
  They've already started doing it here too, trying to grab all the keywords and popular communities (e.g. [email protected]) so it's something to keep note of moving forward too especially as certain instances start to see more growth than others.

Follow both and just post to whichever one you prefer? Eventually certain communities will tend to coalesce, but it isn't a terrible thing if there are multiple options either.

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

There are plenty of subs that have branched off due to corrupt mods and other things.

/r/meirl and /r/me_irl

/r/web_design and /r/webdesign (merged now, though)

/r/gaming, /r/truegaming

but I do agree with you. It definitely hurts to have communities fragmented. Especially if new users don't understand how to view or subscribe to communities outside their instance, they may never see the more popular community on a different instance.

I think changing the default view for content and communities would help. Branching off is one thing and there may be a valid reason for the split. However, I wonder how many current duplicates are accidental. The current setup for Lemmy is to view Local communities by default. An intentional creation of a separate community for a reason is one thing.

Fragmentation of the communities will probably end up happening with time but I don't know that it's best to have things fragment early on when communities and those identities are still, in some cases, in the early stages of development.
The "true" prefix opens a lot of subs and points to a problem with moderation and flash popularity.

At least with lemmy we can easily go to another instance if a mod goes banana.

I think there's been talk of implementing "multireddits" so you can combine them in your own feed but who knows when it's coming. I personally think it's good to have the communities as segmented as possible, if one goes to shit then you can easily just stop participating there and move to others.

A 'multi-community' feature would be welcome.

I suppose having similar communities split across multiple instances is the essence of a federated system. People will gather in communities they feel comfortable.

The way I see it community is just that, a community. It is not a place where people gather, but instead it is a collection of people. You are not limited to meeting your friends in a particular place, you can meet them in a variety of different places, but still be a part of the community. There may be multiple /c/askhistorians, so sub them all and you will be a part of the community in them all. I hope that makes sense.

It would be nice if the instances could essentially federate themselves across instances. If two communities agree, they could both combine and show the posts from one another's feeds, without sacrificing their autonomy. This way if you are subscribed to once instance's community, you could see content from a much larger super community.

How do you deal with r/TOTK and r/Tears_of_the_Kingdom?

Great analogy. Same with r/RingsOfPower and r/LOTR_on_Prime. One community doesn't like the show and the other one does. You join whichever most aligns with your preference.

It will sort itself out. The only difference is reddit's search function works slightly better because it's centralized, but I think that issue will be solved eventually

I could see a good use case for having at least a centralized, cross instance search where the instances will send up community information to the service and then the service shares it out with everyone. Rather than make a new community on my instance I could find the active community and federate it.

Then again the same thing happens on Reddit for popular topics. Like when a new game is announced there might be 5 people trying to start the subreddit for it.
- Its here: https://browse.feddit.de/
- Definitely early days teething issues. There's gonna be thousands of dead communities in a week's time and it'll take time before things settle down and people come to a consensus on the major ones.

I think over time some apps will add functions to allow you to visually merge them. But purely at a UI level. They will still be separate instances on the backend.

Maybe have custom lists created by keyword that merge all the content and the user can blacklist any instances they don't want.
- This seems like the way to go. For another example, there are about forty different Christian subreddits, and I just merged all the ones I was interested in into one custom feed. Same with all the subs about news from Europe.

But yes good question overall from what i can tell the more posts one community gets the more attraction it will pull. Reddit would of been similar in the early days when multiple communities existed for the same thing.

It would be really nice if communities could be connected right at instance level.

So if you have c/abc on instance 1 and c/abc on instance 2, and you subscribe to either of them, it would, by default, subscribe you to both (assuming that both instances agree to such a cooperation).

Something could also be arranged within communities, especially when it comes to posting. Such as, when posting, to be able to select multiple coms to post to, but it would still be just one post you could edit or delete, and have all the comments in one place.

On Reddit I would sometimes struggle with which sub to post to, and I don't like posting to multiple ones or crossposting if I can avoid it.

At that point why not just agree within both communities to all migrate into a single community on whatever instance?
- They may also not be exactly the same just with a significant overlap.
  
  But yea why not. It's just a suggestion for an option that should exist imo.
For subscriptions, I would personally favor a "discovery" mode. When you sub c/abc on Instance 1, it tells you about c/abc on Instances 2 and 3 with the option to sub to them individually.

I like the idea of a single post that gets tagged to the communities it should appear in. Moderators would probably want the option to block or control something like that though, considering the risk of spam.
- I think this would reduce spam if anything. If someone does misuse it, then only one post needs to be reported as spam instead of every sub/com needing to deal with it individually.
  
  Also, a user who is subbed to multiple coms, would only see the post once instead of multiple times.
  
  And for actual spammers it's never a problem to make a hundred identical posts anyway.
I'm not so sure I agree with that use case. Consider these made-up communities on not-made-up instances:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

I think the first two would be great for general questions. But since mander.xyz has a focus on science and nature, it would be more appropriate for science and nature questions.
- Well than only the coms on lemmy and beehaw would choose to be connected by default, and the one on mander wouldn't. Maybe instead they'd choose to connect to c/technology or c/science on other subs.
  
  In general the names of the communities can often be misleading and confusing. Same was the case on Reddit where sometimes two subs can have the exact opposite uses (famously trees and marijuanaenthusiasts (sp.?), and worldpolitics and anime-titties) and it might be better to assign tags/topics.
  
  Then also attach tags and topics to instances themselves so people can choose their home instance with more confidence.

My way of dealing with it is to subscribe to all instances of the community so I don't miss anything. If I feel ownership of the community, I would encourage others in the community to do the same.

The problem with that is duplicate threads about every popular thing.
- It's the price I pay if I want to honor my FOMO. I can always pick one and live with potentially missing some things or not seeing comments from some community members who picked a different instance if I want to prioritize avoiding multiple threads instead. You'd get duplicate posts on a single subreddit anyway, so it doesn't seem that much different.
- You get reposts all over the place on Reddit too, this isn't going to be anything new.

How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?

I suggest creating some communities like "FindingTech", and "FindingScience" and "FindingPets" with some similar naming convention - that covers this topic explicitly. That Finding* communities be the place people discuss the various instances and their experiences/ideals.

I could also see someone creating an entire magazine-like website that highlights new and changing communities and new owner/operators on the scene. Also present a tree of links that is organized based on reviews and allows bookmarking. Such data could be passed down to mobile clients or even some kind of webapp page of Lemmy sites.

Reddit was one big monolithic system operating under a multinational corporation jurisdiction. Small time Lemmy instances may be following conventions of a nation that end-users have never visited... it is much more of a "World Wide Web" convention, and you can see it much more in your face in how the language choice is presented to you on every posting you make.

Think about it - how long until owner/operators of Lemmy instances have to deal with DMCA takedown requests for images? Court-ordered disclosure of IP address and browser information? Who is to say that an operator won't just put everyone's IP Address out as public record - there are forums that operate that way. With massive websites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - a government seeking copies of deleted comments and IP Address is all behind the scenes and rarely disclosed (and even then, mostly disclosed in news reports that police got a copy of social media messages and had an account shut down after a shooting or other crime).

I suggest creating some communities like "FindingTech", and "FindingScience" and "FindingPets" with some similar naming convention - that covers this topic explicitly. That Finding* communities be the place people discuss the various instances and their experiences/ideals.

this is completely different than the issue described. A unified approach on search and/or communities is not being solved by a community where people will suggest other communities.

Maybe that's a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub's that the instance is aware of :)

Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology

Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO

Honestly we'd better picking another main instance from scratch. lemmy.ml is federated with a cesspool of russian shills (lemmygrad) and we don't need this, we really don't need them. Nevermind how many people can register on our new instance, more redditors can start new instances as time goes one and still connect to the communities (subs) on our new one. In a way we don't completely escape federation.

The bonus is that if the admins of the new instance go reddit-crazy, we always have the possibility of picking another instance as the main one.

You bring up an interesting point and it's something that I've been wondering since I learned about lemmy and the federated structure; will it end up being more or less susceptible to bots and bad actors than reddit? I don't have a prediction, I really don't know. But if even a small percentage of the reddit userbase migrates and sticks around we're going to find out because it's going to become a target.

It wasn't always like that on Reddit... how did /r/technology beat out /r/tech? There's hundreds of examples of similar and competing sub names.

One naturally gets more popular. One post on one gets more traction, more people link to it, more people end up subscribing to that one. When new people search for a tech sub they naturally go for the one with all the subscribers. It's a self-perpetuating loop.

It's really no different on Lemmy. Since everything is interconnected and when you search "technology" both communities show up... one will eventually get bigger and become THE place. It's already happening.

It's not really as big an issue as people think. It's just that Lemmy is still in early days and the de facto communities aren't quite established yet. Give it a little time.

I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren't/aren't immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who's actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.

Edit: sorry for necroing this thread, I didn't notice how old it was.

maybe a culture of ea. community listing / linking related/similar ones even if they dont like them? make it easy for people to find ALL the groups for a topic

In my opinion, it makes most sense that they get treated like the same community.

If you subscribe to "c/memes", you will see the posts from any communities on any instances that's name is "memes".

And if any individual one is causing issue, you or your instance can ban the problem instances' version.

Here's one scenario where that idea doesn't work. I was subscribed to /r/pax on Reddit. Occasionally, people would wander through and post about their vapes or ecigs or whatever, not noticing that every post in the subreddit was about the Penny Arcade Expo and not about the ecig/vape brand. (Sorry. I don't know the difference between a vape and an e-cigarette, if there even is one. 😅)

All that to set up this question: what happens when a community is created on one Lemmy instance called "pax" referring to the Penny Arcade Expo while, on another instance, the first mover on "pax" is an e-cig/vape enthusiast? I subscribe for updates on the Penny Arcade Expo, and now, instead of an occasional misguided individual coming through posting about their nicotine enthusiasm, half or more of my posts on "pax" are about that?
- Yeah that's fair.
  
  I think the best situation is that as a general guideline short abbreviations like that are avoided, and in the case of unavoidable name collisions one or both communities would have to further specify the name to avoid conflict.
  
  So the pros are easier user accessibility, a fix of duplicate communities, and the cons is name collisions and potential abuse from communities on different instances.

This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.

Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers