this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Memmy - An iOS client for Lemmy
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these are different communities with the same post in them
Yep. It is a weird design decision to allow the exact same community name for two different communities. It’s encouraging cross posting, dilution of community, and repeated duplicate posts in the “All” feed.
It’s kind of the entire point of lemmy, it’s decentralized. Nobody can control other instances. There’s nobody “allowing” it including the lemmy devs
I don’t think there’s a problem with having a sub named “aww” and a sub named “awww” or “startrek” and “star_trek” — but I think allowing each instance to create distinctly different subs with the exact same name is problematic for the reasons I previously outlined. It’s not a control issue — it should be built into the system. Just like Usenet and dns servers don’t allow entries with the same name.
I don’t think what you’re describing is technically feasible. If it worked how you describe, then when someone makes a community that instance would have to somehow go and ask every single other instance in existence - hey do you have this community name already? We wouldn’t be able to like, keep a database of all the existing communities everywhere.