If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
Duplication happens on Reddit too. It’s not intrinsically bad and has some good aspects.
Community diversity can allow for diversity in moderation, sub-culture, vibes etc.
I think a good balance can be reached here on the #threadiverse/#fediverse (ie, with decentralisation).
The real question isn’t whether it will be good/bad … it’s what we can do to make it as good as possible. The key issues are around searching and surfacing communities. The lemmy software can get better in this regard. Some basic third party tools like what feddit.de have made can also help.
I often preferred using the alternate/splinter versions of many reddit subs. When a sub got too large, the quality went down fast. I think the redundancy is maybe a good thing.
I think critical mass is needed for certain communities, and user splitting is bad for that.
In the early days during growth, yes I think you’re right. Adds to the frustration of people learning about federation and all that to.
Which gets to what we as the actual community members here can do to help in these early phases … share and collect information about what communities are gaining traction and which people should join.
For instance, there are two NBA communities I’m aware of, one on lemmy.ml, which is rather old, and one on lemmy.ml, which is very new. The old one is basically dead and everyone should go to the new one. I’ve posted this much to the old one so people know where to go.
Creating meta community communities for discussions around this can help too.