The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
It’s an example. If there are multiple instances of a thing do I need to subscribe to all of them? The answer is yes. It’s different from Reddit but there are pro and cons.
The answer is no. You don’t NEED to subscribe to all of them. If you want to make absolutely sure you don’t miss a single thing everyone says on that topic, then maybe you do. But if you are just interested in electric cars, you can just pick the most active one of the one with the most subscribers. Even on reddit there were both /r/electriccars and /r/electricvehicles.
While I agree with what you’re saying in terms of seeing posts, the flip side is wanting to make a post visible to as many users are possible gets tougher.
Say I have a problem with my MicroSonySonic MPZoomPod that’s driving me crazy to figure out, so I figure I’ll post on Lemmy about it and see if anyone else has had that problem and a solution. In the reddit days, I just go to /r/MPZOOMPOD, or I google for “reddit mpzoompod” and find the subreddit. I can now post there knowing I’m hitting the entire community of mpzoompod users, or at least the majority of them. To do that on Lemmy, though, I now have to wonder if instead of a single community with 120k users, I have 12 communities with 10k users. So either I post to a tiny fraction of the communty, and thus have a much lower chance of getting my question answered, or I post the same thing to 12 different communites and have 12 different threads to keep track of for replies.
Obviously this is simplified, cause more likely there will be on big community somewhere, a couple other smaller versions, and then probably a couple completely devoid of posts from when people were first migrating to Lemmy and were excited to start communities.
Anyway, that was kind of a lot, but I think it really comes down to the subject matter. I don’t need 5 versions of showerthoughts, and I don’t care if showerthoughts has 1k subscribers or 1m subscribers, but if I really wanted showerthoughts to grow in popularity, the more people using one copy the better. Alternatively,it would be rad if /c/googlepixel or whatever wasn’t fragmented so I could know I was looking at the most likely source of information.
It’s all kind of an interesting thing to think about, and I can’t decide just yet which way I’d personally prefer. I remember reddit before all the digg people piled in, and I liked how it felt more like a community back then, but I also can’t disregard how incredible reddit has been in recent times for finding answers to specific questions, or getting news, or finding fans of a particular subject just because it became the default website to look for that stuff.