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Why do I get different results when searching for communities on two different instances?
(lemmy.ml)
This is what I mean...Left is tchncs.de, right is Lemmy.ml
Edit: Also, trying to access those communities that don't appear in the search result for specific instance, gives this message
404: couldnt_find_community
A lemmy instance will only show communities that someone’s has previously searched using the full url. You can find a list of all available instances here: http://browse.feddit.de/
How is this expected to become popular if you need to go through all of that? I figured I could just search for a topic then subscribe, but if they're all separate then surely they'll all just become segmented with time and contain duplicate communities in many cases?
popularity is actually the solution to this specific problem. as things get more popular they will have been loaded up already.
you're only able to have this issue at all because it's new
I partly agree, duplicate communities is something that needs to be addressed somehow.
Strongly agree on this one. If there's already multiple gaming communities. Popular topics might have multiple communities on multiple instances very soon and that's confusing for people.
I think it could be a good thing overall
each community might have a different culture so you can choose which to participate in
like r/gaming vs. r/games on reddit
both are 'gaming' communities but are not really the same in content
As long as it is like that, i would agree. But i fear there might be competing communities that are mostly similar. Might be that through Darwinian selection at one point the fittest community survives but until then it might get confusing.
yeah I'll be interested to see how it all plays out starting on the 12th, and especially after July 1st
we will likely see multiple communities vying to be 'top dog' in their respective specialties
as far as I can tell this really isn't a problem for other federated software like Mastodon because people just use hashtags over there instead of defined communities with rules like reddit/lemmy where people 'join' and generally hang out
either way I'm excited to see what happens
Ok, but question: If anyone can start up a Lemmy server, how do you expect existing servers to know about the new ones without someone explicitly making the connection?
There's no central Lemmy mainframe that every server is connected to. There are no hardwired or mandatory connections, and there shouldn't be. I'm the face of that, what alternative solution do you propose?
Only the very first user to subscribe/search for a new community needs to do this. It'll just appear for everyone else on that instance from then on.
And the devs are working on a solution to make this happen more automatically.
Segmentation was a problem on Reddit too. Anyone could make a sub with a similar name to compete with another. Users on lemmy will probably slowly gravitate towards one or two big communities for each topic. It's just early days.
I think it's quite an important point that it only needs to happen once. I've not seen that mentioned anywhere else so thank you