I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
This is a discoverability problem that can be solved separately from the duplication “problem” though. Reddit has all the same duplication, there’s /r/tech and /r/technology, there’s /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, there’s suddenly 3 million aita communities. What makes people not sweat this at Reddit is that subreddit search is MUCH MUCH better than Lemmy’s community search. You always find the biggest subreddit first, and there’s no danger of finding only the small/irrelevant community because the big/main one didn’t show up in your search for confusing federation reasons.
If community search was effortless and worked to discover the biggest relevant community irrespective of the server it’s on, I think people would immediately stop caring about community duplication, similar to how it’s rarely cited as a problem on Reddit even though it’s rampant there as well.
You’ve articulated this much better than I could. I actually mentioned /r/AITI in one of my other comments actually, because it’s a great way to highlight how confusing community names can be.
I too am confused by the sudden proliferation of AITA subs, and I can only assume it’s due to some moderation decision. If a sub like AITAH grew to become larger than AITA, then that suggests maybe the community ™ were pretty united against whatever decision led to AITAH, and that we could then guess at some of this history by the sub names, because AITAH is clearly descended from AITA.
“memes” is another example. I’ve seen a few subs decide to separate out meme content because it can take over a sub, and usually their sister sub is in the sidebar, but on Lemmy, this may not be as clear.
Let’s say that we have nichehobby.lemmy.ml and nichehobby.lemmy.world, and because it’s such a niche hobby, they cannot compete with each other, so instead end up becoming specialised. Maybe niche hobby.lemmy.world becomes full of more meme content, while the other community is the “main” one. That’s a good dynamic to end up with, but it’s harder for a user to understand than on Reddit
Because on Reddit, I might see a crosspost or popular post from /r/nichehobbymemes and then wonder “huh, does that mean there’s a /r/nichehobby ?” And usually there is. It helps with discoverability