How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic?
I come from Reddit and been enjoying Lemmy so far. How is Lemmy dealing with multiple communities on the same topic? To me:
If the communities are all active, then I shall subscribe to all of them, but end up having lots of duplicate/similar posts on my feed
If there is one community that is dominating, then what is the point of federation?
I was subscribed to [email protected], and just because I actively went into it, I saw a post that the community was frozen and they decided to use another android community on a different server, to avoid fragmentation.
They haven’t. I’ve given up on finding new communities at this point since it’s a ton of work to figure out which ones are active and which ones are worth subscribing to.
It’s one of the biggest problems with the platform, despite it also being one of the biggest selling points.
If there’s 4 different communities for my already niche community, none of the 4 are going to have decent levels of participation.
I don’t like being subscribed to a large number of communities. It gets hard to sort and read. I prefer to have my subscribed list being small and focused and then just searching for anything else, which doesn’t really work.
I hated having to discover subreddits too, so it’s nothing new for me
With Reddit, sorting by new was insane - so many submittals every minute that it was a useless approach for finding subs. But Lemmy is orders of magnitude smaller - you can do all/new and get a pretty good feel for content in a dozen pages. Can do the same with top day.
Long term, I think the competing communities could be an issue, but I doubt many duplicate sets will stay long term - people will migrate to the most active.
While that’s useful, I’m not a fan of needing to subscribe to individual communities. I like keeping my subscribed feed to a few subs that I interact with regularly. I’m an outlier of a use case for sure, but it was the same on Reddit. Only ever subscribed to 8-10 communities, the rest were from the front pages.
I know it is, and it’s why I’m still not sure I’m going to stick around. I don’t like federation. It’s confusing and is going to be what keeps this platform from any kind of mainstream adoption.
I personally don’t see the point if it doesn’t grow a whole lot more. Most of the communities I enjoyed on Reddit don’t exist here and probably never will, because they were already niche communities on Reddit.