I understand that a user on any instance can subscribe to any community in the fediverse, but I have been a bit confused when searching for communities to join. Sometimes there are communities on different instances, with the exact same name.
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Do these communities talk to each other at all, or are they completely separate, with a different host, posts, mods, subscribers etc.
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Should I just join the largest (and presumably, most active) one?
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Is there anything in place to discourage communities of same name, but different instances, from “competing”?
It’s a different kind of friction/confusion than we’re used to.
Plenty of people have declared the fediverse “too confusing” etc, but once you’re here and places to be you’re fine. It’s about the people and social activity not the tech.
And sure, there are plenty of UI and UX issues, this is young software without big investment running on volunteers and donations that’s been waiting for the users to come on the basis of values rather than killer features. It’ll get better the more people come.
But duplicated communities with the same name but in different instances/domains isn’t really more confusing than duplicated subreddits with different names. Rather, we’re used to big central platforms and haven’t internalised decentralised platforms where the domain or instance name means something.
If anything, the decentralised version, once you know that decentralisation is a thing, is more clear: different people doing the same thing. More similar to real life and meetups or groups in different cities. Subreddits with different names was always tricky because you had to work out what the actual difference was.
Yeah I think this is what I meant. It’s confusing because it’s a different paradigm to all of the other big social media that we’re used to.
I like your analogy with real life communities. Lemmy does have that unique feel of different communities coming together which I actually like.