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 [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
Ask yourself if you subscribed to /r/tech or /r/technology or both or neither (or /r/pics, /r/pic etc., whatever you jam is) and you will have your answer.
A community name is just an address, both on Lemmy and on Reddit. It never mean that that address had the exclusive rights to a topic.
Yeah, this actually happens on Reddit a fair amount. Off the top of my head, there’s /r/tearsofthekingdom and /r/totk which both have 100,000+ subs, and /r/nsfw_gif and /r/nsfw_gifs that have millions of subs.
EDIT: There’s also /r/gaming and /r/games which was a notable early community split when people started complaining that /r/gaming had too many low-effort memes.