Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

Let them be. There are 20 different memes subreddits as well the best one will win.

I don't think people know (how end-users will cope with the distributed choices of Lemmy). Reddit 2023 is nothing at all like Lemmy. One could be considered a household name for regular users of the Internet, the other a return to something more like FidoNet.

I come from the BBS days of the early 1980's and even social media radio before that. I come from IRL user group meetings, held at public library and after-hours company meeting rooms. It has always bothered me that current-day subreddits have mostly no identity to the moderators and that moderation is often behind the scenes.

I guess it's like "corporate experience" that people expect this day in society... that you can walk into a generic franchise chain bar and grill and not really care who the owner/operator and bouncers are of your hangout. Anyone can start a topic/ conversation and there is just some anonymous janitorial crew who is supposed to clean up the overflowing mess if (non-venue) spam or hate messages enter into the space.

The mechanisms of who pays for the venue and the moderators also was a topic most people never bothered to think about. Like it was some taxpayer-funded city park and perhaps the admin police might spot check if anyone was causing a tragedy in that there commons. But reality is that it was a profit-seeking venue charging a cover charge in the form of selling copies of your contribution and changing the tone of your meeting space by controlling the jukebox that visitors hear in terms of advertising messages inserted into the conversation space.

Lemmy seems small, owner/operator focused, and you get a sense that each instance is like some small bar and grill where you can come and meet some strangers or friends to discuss some topics under house rules. Your tips help pay for the hosting and the jukebox isn't piped in memes from advertisers.

I remember when Reddit had known owners with known ideals, but that was very long ago. I've found making it big (with the associated wealth) changes people. One owner even committed suicide over his society ideals about sharing information. Ultimately I feel like a lack of topic participation by the moderators and owners alike made people thoughtless as to their own role in building a human community and people often felt like they were fighting machines and code.

sorry if this meandered off topic, but lately I've had some long-time friends ask me 'what is Reddit" since it is in the news lately, and I find it hard to explain what Reddit used to be (before new Reddit and the addition of images/video) vs. the corporate-like entity we know today that our contributions and participation helped empower over the past 17 years. I've used it mostly daily for all that time, and I have been unhappy with society's dehumanizing direction for too many years.

/ramble from a disturbed mind.

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

There are plenty of subs that have branched off due to corrupt mods and other things.

/r/meirl and /r/me_irl

/r/web_design and /r/webdesign (merged now, though)

/r/gaming, /r/truegaming

but I do agree with you. It definitely hurts to have communities fragmented. Especially if new users don't understand how to view or subscribe to communities outside their instance, they may never see the more popular community on a different instance.

I think there's been talk of implementing "multireddits" so you can combine them in your own feed but who knows when it's coming. I personally think it's good to have the communities as segmented as possible, if one goes to shit then you can easily just stop participating there and move to others.

It would be nice if the instances could essentially federate themselves across instances. If two communities agree, they could both combine and show the posts from one another's feeds, without sacrificing their autonomy. This way if you are subscribed to once instance's community, you could see content from a much larger super community.

How do you deal with r/TOTK and r/Tears_of_the_Kingdom?

It will sort itself out. The only difference is reddit's search function works slightly better because it's centralized, but I think that issue will be solved eventually

I think over time some apps will add functions to allow you to visually merge them. But purely at a UI level. They will still be separate instances on the backend.

Follow both and just post to whichever one you prefer? Eventually certain communities will tend to coalesce, but it isn't a terrible thing if there are multiple options either.

It's a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don't think democratically and rule against other people's will deleting posts and banning everyone they don't like.

With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)

I suppose having similar communities split across multiple instances is the essence of a federated system. People will gather in communities they feel comfortable.

My way of dealing with it is to subscribe to all instances of the community so I don't miss anything. If I feel ownership of the community, I would encourage others in the community to do the same.

How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?

I suggest creating some communities like "FindingTech", and "FindingScience" and "FindingPets" with some similar naming convention - that covers this topic explicitly. That Finding* communities be the place people discuss the various instances and their experiences/ideals.

I could also see someone creating an entire magazine-like website that highlights new and changing communities and new owner/operators on the scene. Also present a tree of links that is organized based on reviews and allows bookmarking. Such data could be passed down to mobile clients or even some kind of webapp page of Lemmy sites.

Reddit was one big monolithic system operating under a multinational corporation jurisdiction. Small time Lemmy instances may be following conventions of a nation that end-users have never visited... it is much more of a "World Wide Web" convention, and you can see it much more in your face in how the language choice is presented to you on every posting you make.

Think about it - how long until owner/operators of Lemmy instances have to deal with DMCA takedown requests for images? Court-ordered disclosure of IP address and browser information? Who is to say that an operator won't just put everyone's IP Address out as public record - there are forums that operate that way. With massive websites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - a government seeking copies of deleted comments and IP Address is all behind the scenes and rarely disclosed (and even then, mostly disclosed in news reports that police got a copy of social media messages and had an account shut down after a shooting or other crime).

But yes good question overall from what i can tell the more posts one community gets the more attraction it will pull. Reddit would of been similar in the early days when multiple communities existed for the same thing.

It would be really nice if communities could be connected right at instance level.

So if you have c/abc on instance 1 and c/abc on instance 2, and you subscribe to either of them, it would, by default, subscribe you to both (assuming that both instances agree to such a cooperation).

Something could also be arranged within communities, especially when it comes to posting. Such as, when posting, to be able to select multiple coms to post to, but it would still be just one post you could edit or delete, and have all the comments in one place.

On Reddit I would sometimes struggle with which sub to post to, and I don't like posting to multiple ones or crossposting if I can avoid it.

Honestly we'd better picking another main instance from scratch. lemmy.ml is federated with a cesspool of russian shills (lemmygrad) and we don't need this, we really don't need them. Nevermind how many people can register on our new instance, more redditors can start new instances as time goes one and still connect to the communities (subs) on our new one. In a way we don't completely escape federation.

The bonus is that if the admins of the new instance go reddit-crazy, we always have the possibility of picking another instance as the main one.