I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren't/aren't immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who's actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.

Edit: sorry for necroing this thread, I didn't notice how old it was.

In my opinion, it makes most sense that they get treated like the same community.

If you subscribe to "c/memes", you will see the posts from any communities on any instances that's name is "memes".

And if any individual one is causing issue, you or your instance can ban the problem instances' version.

maybe a culture of ea. community listing / linking related/similar ones even if they dont like them? make it easy for people to find ALL the groups for a topic

Maybe that's a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub's that the instance is aware of :)

Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology

Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO

If they’re similar enough I suppose they could merge, with the larger community eating the smaller one. Even though Reddit is a singular “instance” I used to mod a sub called /r/stopcomcast. There was a similar subreddit called /r/WarOnComcast and the existence of both didn’t make sense. We agreed to merge the subreddits and encourage users of /r/stopcomcast to go over to the other subreddit.

Here I’d imagine it would be just a little more difficult with separate instances being an extra layer and deciding who gets what.

This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.

Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers

It wasn't always like that on Reddit... how did /r/technology beat out /r/tech? There's hundreds of examples of similar and competing sub names.

One naturally gets more popular. One post on one gets more traction, more people link to it, more people end up subscribing to that one. When new people search for a tech sub they naturally go for the one with all the subscribers. It's a self-perpetuating loop.

It's really no different on Lemmy. Since everything is interconnected and when you search "technology" both communities show up... one will eventually get bigger and become THE place. It's already happening.

It's not really as big an issue as people think. It's just that Lemmy is still in early days and the de facto communities aren't quite established yet. Give it a little time.