what’s stopping 8 different instances from hosting a ‘politics’, ‘funny’, ‘fediverse’, community?
these duplicate communities defeat the goal to replace reddit.
Nothing, and that prevents one instance to claim a specific community. Time will filter out the best of those similar communities.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
We are early days. Competition breeds innovation. The best communities will filter to the top
well, it’s confusing for new user like me : you have the feeling that as soon as you subscribe to a community, you interact with the same community on all instances. Forbid duplicate names could be a solution
But then a single instance could lock out all other instances from having that community name. Even if that instance didn’t actually have a good community.
you’re right. it’s not really a big deal if you know how lemmy works and understand you subscribe to a ‘local’ community.
Won’t happen, one of the pros of how it works comes from the Devs themselves:
You could have two news
communities but you’ll know you have news@lemmy.ca
and news@lemmy.uk
or something similar.
For general communities might be confusing, but you still have this in reddit and other similar platforms, you have r/memes, r/dankmemes, r/dank_meme, and many others.
What was stopping people on reddit? You could make /r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/TechNews, etc
It’s a bit muddy right now but a clear winner for each topic will win out and become “the” place for that topic. Give it time, let people figure things out.
One good thing about multiple communities based on instances is you can have regional communities based on what instance they are on. /c/politics on lemmy.ml is technically neutral, but we all know its meant to be American politics, so opening a /c/politics on lemmy.ca even though it has the same name would serve a different purpose and be centered around Canadian politics instead.
Overall though I definitely think a multireddit type solution needs to be created for this, that way similar communities could be grouped together and mass subscribed to all at once.