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 largely agree with you, there’s already redundant subreddits and such.
But I think when we’re trying to capture a ton of Reddit users, anything that represents a hurdle to new user adoption is a concern. That goes double for things that are intrinsic to the Fediverse that aren’t intuitive to new users like myself.
It’s okay to not know something. We aren’t born with perfect knowledge of subreddits. Reddit was just as confusing at first.
You’re right. After almost a decade and a half on reddit, I’d forgotten that it also had a learning curve when I first came across it.
I guess that speaks to how terrible the official reddit app is, I’d rather learn a whole new site with a whole new framework than view reddit without RiF is Fun.
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.
We don’t need to become reddit though, reddit is the problem. There is something about how it’s structured that encourages toxicity. I would be more concerned about keeping these communities positive and welcoming. We don’t need to make it inviting to all of reddit… I’m sure I’m not the only one that would rather see hurdles for entry than open floodgates for the kind of stuff that was making even the nicest and sanest of people into crazy assholes. My outlook has completely changed since leaving that cesspool and I’m actually horrified by how nihilistic it had made me. The world is a mess but reddit is worse.