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How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances? (lemmy.ml)

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

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

With Lemmy, doesn't it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?

This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I'm quite enjoying myself here.

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[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A very precise way to phrase this is to say:

There is no community called technology on Lemmy. There is a community called [!technology@beehaw.org](/c/technology@beehaw.org) and a separate community called [!technology@lemmy.ml](/c/technology@lemmy.ml). They are different communities with different mods that discuss similar topics. Their proper "names" are comprised of BOTH the topic description AND the home instance.

Every community on Reddit happens to share the same home instance, like mysub@reddit.com, but it makes very little difference if you start thinking of the sub-name as just being comprised of both parts.

Another funny wrinkle is that your home instance will often (always?) hide the instance name from local communities. So for someone with an account on lemmy.ml, [!technology@lemmy.ml](/c/technology@lemmy.ml) will look like just plain old technology. But this is just how the UI styles local communities, they still homed to the instance where your account is, and they are still most precisely and correctly described with their full identifier, including their instance name as anything else is ambiguous to people with accounts on various different instances.