As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
I’m think what you’re feeling is not really the community duplication (although that’s worse right now cause everything was dead 2w ago and there’s almost no downside to making new communities cause almost nothing is well established), but rather the poor community discovery.
One of the engines that drove the “natural” aggregation of users in the big subreddits is that when you searched for subreddits the big ones were at the top of the list. When you search on Lemmy, the big communities may not be on the list at all. But I think folks recognize this as a challenge and will work on it. This week is about keeping the lights on though.