I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.

Stop asking this. Reddit has this kind of problem as well but people ultimately sort it out.

I think this is desired. Lemme give my case. I think r/historymemes is absolutely flooded with racism, tankies and neo-nazis, and perhaps more than the rest, colonial apologia. Reddit being centralised, I can’t create another r/historymemes.

Say we have a c/historymemes in some instance. The same racism and shit happens. No problem, I can look for a new c/historymemes on some other instance that is better moderated in regards to those problems.

I’d rather have multiple small communities than monolithic ones in most cases personally, that and it avoids the reddit problem of being forced to use a subreddit despite bad/creepy mods cause you can just make your own version in another instance

I don’t really see the issue. I’ve subscribed to Technology maybe 4 times now? All that means is I get more tech in my feed. It doesn’t really matter which specific community it is, does it? If there is an interesting tech-related story or news item I’m bound to get it on one of them, or all of them, and each post might have its own insightful comments on the subject. It’s just more content and more opportunity for discussion. I think Lemmy will excel at bringing forward content in this way because you can sub to many different communities around a singular topic. You’ll never be limited to just one place like a subreddit with mods who shape the content you get to see. If any one community started to be artificially controlled like this, there are 3 more who aren’t.

Yea, it’s an endless debate lately.

Just subscribe to everything, and use your judgment where to post if you post. We can already see some clear bias towards the largest ones so it’s possible the small clones will be left behind.

Or not and dupes will remain. Wait and sew after things settle down a bit.

There were duplicate communities all over Reddit too, as long as he didn’t have exactly the same name there were lots and lots of subs that had more or less the same content with overlaps of subscribers. Whenever those duplicates eventually one will pull ahead and most people will be active there.

Why fight it? If they want 3 different asklemmy instances, let them. Eventually users will flock to the most active one, or there will be parallel ones. Then it’s on you to either join all or stick to whichever one you feel most welcome at.

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.