Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Communities on multiple servers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by matir@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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I see there's a /c/technology on lemmy.ml, but also a /c/technology on beehaw.org. As far as I can tell, they're completely independent and unrelated. This feels like it will create fractured communities, especially as more servers come online. Is there any plan for avoiding fragmentation? Is the expectation that the community for a particular topic will congregate around a single one of the instances?

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[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Overlapping communities happen both here and on Reddit, and they happen in substantially similar ways for substantially similar reasons. Reddit has both /r/tech and /r/technology which appear to have entirely overlapping topics. There are tons of other examples of this on Reddit as well.

There's a natural incentive to avoid fragmentation, which is that empty communities aren't very interesting. Barring major disagreements about how a community is moderated, most folks will gravitate to the largest community for a given topic across all the major/commonly-federated instances.

All of which is to say, it's not obvious that fragmentation is lots more serious on Lemmy than on Reddit or other sites where anyone can create a community.