What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren’t good with tech.
For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we’ll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy’s advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.
Having multicommunities (either the option to automatically combine all communities with the same name across federated instances into one feed, or some sort of manual linking from the mod side where a community gets combined outward facing while still being hosted across servers with seperate mods) has already been brought up and would be a very good feature to mitigate this issue too. It’s not something that has to stay impossible forever.
I don’t have plans to visit other instances, manage multiple credentials.
Either I get to see it all from one place. Or these other places will functionally but exist for me.
If I subscribe to /c/knitting I mean I want every /c/knitting on every single instance in existence.
And I don’t want to maintain a list of instances either.
I’m going to go to /c/knitting on the random instance I chose when I created my account and whatever is not there, does not exist.
Communities should not get fragmented on a per server basis. That’s just going to encourage users to migrate to the one big instance that hosts the one big community
Duplicate communities should have been prohibited, or at least regulated, from the start. To me the problem is Why TF are people making a 2nd knitting community when one already exists? Instance theme isn’t appropriate for the original community? Migrate it.
You’re missing the point of having a decentralized network. As long as people are allowed to spin up their own instance, duplicate communities are bound to exist. You can view both of them or choose which one you prefer.
I don’t have plans to visit other instances, manage multiple credentials. Either I get to see it all from one place. Or these other places will functionally but exist for me.
You don’t have to manage multiple credentials. You can visit and subscribe to /c/knitting on another instance as long as your instance is not blocking it, or blocked by it.
If I subscribe to /c/knitting I mean I want every /c/knitting on every single instance in existence.
Would you? The point of having multiple instances is that /c/knitting@gaming.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by gaming, /c/knitting@memes.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by memes and so on. You may not want all of them. This is a bit of a stretched argument, but I want to showcase an example where fragmenting communities on a per server basis can be useful.
I know that for generic communities or hobbies it can be annoying, but it isn’t that hard to find the largest /c/knitting and subscribe to that, no matter the instance. Reddit’s centralized approach is more convenient, but we’ve seen the price we have to pay for that convenience.
