Lemme explain with subreddits.

You have /r/tech and /r/technology, right? Different subreddits, different communities. Somebody posts something on /r/tech and crossposts it to /r/technology. You're subscribed to both. You now see the same link twice.

That's exactly what's happening here, cross-posting to different communities. It's still the wild west out here, but I would expect a lot of these communities to solidify behind 2-3 "winners" over time, with the smaller ones becoming more niche.

People are coming from Reddit where they posted to every relevant subreddit, and they’re doing the same here. It is unnecessary because of how the fediverse works, they’re just trying to maximize engagement.

I suppose it's a bit like the Wild West at the moment, with everyone figuring out the rules as we go along.

I suppose there are a few explanations for this, helped by the fact that it is very easy to share a post between instances and communities (it makes more sense with the latter where there is crossover, eg a band is playing at a festival and you post to the band community and then copy that to the festival community):

a) it's just someone who doesn't understand how instances work. A polite message would seem to be in order.

b) it's someone using Lemmy to promote themselves or a product (either doing it by hand or possibly using some kind of bot). Everyone's mileage might differ on this but, to me, that looks like spam and should probably be removed. I imagine when we have robust (any?) moderation bots that is the kind of thing that would ping up on their radar. For now, if you think it looks spammy, report it.

However, I haven't seen any examples so can't really go into more detail on that.

Growing pains.

Federated environments lead people to create the same content on different instances.

Some people will then cross post between those instances.

On top of that there has been some issues with environments not being in sync with one another. So some people are creating threads on multiple instances to ensure that information exists across as many instances as possible.

Think of it like how people forward emails without checking who was on the original recipient list.

É complicado mesmo...